Narratives and legacies of 1960s Vogue Italia covers on contemporary Italian young women

Abstract

The article investigates the legacy, in terms of narratives and representations of femininity, of Vogue Italia covers from the 1960s and 1970s on contemporary Italian young women. To do this, we visually and textually analyse two different corpora: 143 Vogue Italia covers, retrieved from the Vogue Italia Archive and published between 1964 (Vogue’s first publication in Italy) and 1974 and between 2020 and 2022; and 46 mock covers of fashion simulated magazines created by female undergraduate fashion students during the academic years 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. Through the first corpus we examine the hegemonic discourse of Vogue Italia, assuming that it expresses the typical Italian way of creating and expressing female fashion while reflecting the shifting ideologies of the Italian feminist movement over the last century; the second corpus reveals the imaginations and narratives of young girls on fashion, disclosing how women’s – and girls’ – identities have been shaped over time and how the standards for femininity, beauty, happiness and health have been transferred and reworked from one generation to the next. In our study the parallel investigation between the longitudinal analysis of the visual apparatus Vogue Italia and the covers produced by students shows, first, elements of continuity and similarity in the communicative and instrumental use of fashion, according to the practice of remixing. Second, it demonstrates that students assimilated successfully the narrative codes typical of traditional fashion communication media but they reinterpret the imagery and representations disseminated, thus bringing into the public discourse issues such as sustainability, gender, diversity, body positivity and stereotypes. Therefore, the study also reveals that girls have always been more than simple passive consumers of fashion magazines and cultural products.