Milanese literature and fashion in the 1950s and 1960s

Today I am recounting Milan, the city of a thousand faces, the "moral capital," a veteran of World War II from which it emerged almost completely destroyed.
Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of its citizens it managed to completely recover from that terrible conflict.
Thanks also to the industriousness of its people it was, even then, called the "city that never sleeps"!
In the late 1950s, the effects of the city's industrialization began to be felt.
Not only industrious Milanese but also an influx of migrants from Southern Italy contributed to the cultural enrichment of the metropolis, thanks in part to Milan's welcoming of citizens from the South.
Economy and culture intertwine; the city becomes a point of reference for its well-known writers, who describe a picture ranging from upper middle-class Milan to the Milan of working-class neighborhoods.
This intertwining also fosters the emergence of a new interest in fashion.
Indeed, the first Milanese tailor's shops are born, linked to the first fashion shows in 1958, with the birth of the first Fashion week.
In the same year we see in Milan the birth of the first Italian Fashion Chamber.
What we are interested in noting is the beginning of the creation, to all intents and purposes, of an innovative European center assimilable to major capitals such as Paris and London.
Nevertheless, this Milan maintains its own cultural identity reflecting the many souls even in the literary field.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Think of Tuscan Luciano Bianciardi: "La vita agra" (1962), His most successful novel, written as an autobiography, is about the initial difficulties of those who emigrate to Milan. 
The protagonist leaves the province and with it his wife and small son to live in Milan with the initial intention of avenging the miners who died in an accident caused by poor work safety. The reference to the 1954 Ribolla mine accident in which 43 miners lost their lives is obvious.
The novel, "La vita agra," reflects the social contradictions of the town and the consequences of the Italian economic boom on society and interpersonal relationships.
The novel inspired the beautiful 1964 film of the same name "La vita agra" by Carlo Lizzani, with Ugo Tognazzi playing the Bianciardi/protagonist.

Luciano Bianciardi is an author, if you will, cursed, living in dilapidated railing houses (then not fashionable) and smoky bars. But he also moves in the elegant Milan of Brera.

Brera itself is at the center of the literary gaze of Lalla Romano, the great painter and writer, one of the most significant figures of the Italian 20th century.
Sophisticated and cultured, we remember her for her sharp gaze on the Milanese city and, above all, for her love of the Brera district.
Lalla Romano was born and grew up in Piedmont, but after the war she joined her husband in Milan. Here she resumed teaching, began writing works of fiction and, in 1951, published "Le metamorfosi," a series of short prose texts devoted to the description of dreams. In 1953 and 1957 he published his first two novels. The first, "Maria," a story of a complicated servant-mistress relationship, won considerable critical acclaim. In the second, Walled Roof, the protagonist is Ada, a woman of strong morals. In 1953 she also published a collection of poems "Autumn."
Romano, a woman with a closed and introverted character, leads a shy and very secluded existence, with little contact with the intellectual and literary world; her fiction, often autobiographical, describes family relationships not without harshness, reticence and half-truths typical of the good northern bourgeoisie.
The work that reveals the writer to the general public is the novel "Le parole tra noi leggere," which won the Strega Prize in 1969, its title taken from a line by Montale. In it Romano describes and analyzes her relationship with her son, a difficult and rebellious boy, asocial and nonconformist. The book met with considerable success, perhaps partly because it deals with the themes proper to youth revolt, which were particularly felt at the time.
 

Then we have the Milan of Giambellino by the great Giovanni Testori, an author of books also focused on Milan's working-class suburbs (his novel "Nebbia al Giambellino," written in 1960, was published posthumously in 1995).

It follows the Milan of Carlo Emilio Gadda, who ironically depicts Milan's upper middle class (his 1963 novel "Accoppiamenti giudiziosi" was recently republished by Adelphi). In mocking the bourgeoisie he lets aspects of their own fashion emerge.

We have the mingling of various literary genres, such as the giallo noir by the great Giorgio Scierbanenco, author of the very famous book "Milano calibro 9" (1969), from which the 1972 film "Milano calibro 9", written and directed by Fernando Di Leo, is also based.
The film is the first chapter of the director's so-called milieu trilogy. The title of the film is from an anthology of short stories by Giorgio Scerbanenco: the idea of the parcel bomb and the exchange of packages is taken from Stazione centrale. The film stars Gastone Moschin and Barbara Bouchet.

The culmination of the connection between Milan, literature and fashion, is totally represented in Dino Buzzati, a great Milanese writer and journalist, who carried out his 40 years at Corriere della Sera
It is very important to note that a very busy writer like Buzzati admirable author of the "Desert of the Tartars" had a particular sensitivity to the way both men and women dressed.
Buzzati, very rigorous and elegant in dress, had a keen sense of beauty and fashion, despite various social tragedies present in the city of Milan. 
Let us recall that he was a special correspondent for the Corriere at haute couture fashion shows as early as January 1962 in Paris and in 1963 at Palazzo Pitti.
He paraded his own personal ranking of designers even then. 

Culturally committed Milan with social problems related to industrialization and the emergence of large working-class suburbs never stops transforming and innovating. Moralist Milan, Moral Capital, opens to fashion!
So we see that, for all intents and purposes, it already offers from the 1960s on, the combination of committed culture and aesthetics, beauty configured by fashion.
The city succeeds in providing a balance between material problems and the search for "the superfluous," through the birth of fashion salons and the high-end tailoring workshops.

Pioneer Emilio Pucci launches his first collection in Milan as well as in Florence, his artistic homeland.
Elio Fiorucci, an eclectic pioneer of Milanese fashion, began to make his mark and in 1967 opened his first store in Galleria Passarella. 
This transgressive and luminous space of his was also loved by the great Andy Wharol.

The legendary Ottavio Missoni also opened his first stores in the Milan area. 
In 1966 Missoni launched his first fashion show at Milan's Teatro Gerolamo and it was a great success.

The great fashion visionary Anna Piaggi, born in Milan in '31, becomes editor of Vogue Italia. She is the inspiration for the documentary film "Anna Piaggi: A dreamer in the fashion world," made by Alina Marazzi, which chronicles the life of one of the fashion industry's most influential voices, muse of Karl Lagerfeld and inventor of vintage ante litteram.

Mila Schon, a fashion designer who moved from Dalmatia to Milan after the war, founded her first atelier in '58.
Seven years later she launched her first women's collection in the famous Pitti collection. Mila Schon also dressed Jacqueline Kennedy.

This is expanded by the spread of fashion magazines launched in Italy by publishers such as Rusconi and Mondadori 
At the same time, the great Milanese publishing industry expands to a wider audience 

A landmark of coexistence of these different souls ensures that Milan remains over time a reference point for the whole country in terms of both any economic recovery and the cultural revival of our country. Thus a beacon for all other Italian cities
A city that knows how to transform itself through the times, maintaining its own cultural identity, despite the beginning of a principle of internationalization.

The Milan that ends up in the vortex of the heroine, described admirably, by Emilio Tadini. 
Let us move on to the Milan of the 1980s where a different discourse prevails in which there is a basic transformation: aesthetics and beauty have the upper hand compared to an existentialist vision of the previous years.
A transformation dictated by the times that materialized with the birth of the great fashion designers.
Armani, Miuccia Prada, Emilio Fiorucci, Missoni, Valentino, become protagonists of Milanese culture.

These transformations have an impact of internationalization of the city and become for all intents and purposes a unique revolution in the Italian cultural landscape
Let us say that in Milan there is a continuity albeit different in the various mdi of making culture 

We also have the Sicilian Elio Vittorini in a Milan destroyed by bombing in the 1940s initially an inhospitable city

as well as a culturally committed city and defined as a moral capital, its transformation also into an economic capital