After the end of the Second World War new and creative figures emerged on the scene of Roman couture: it was the dawn of a process of growing awareness, popularization and transformation of the Italian way of dressing that was to culminate in the success that the “made in Italy” brand has enjoyed throughout the world, from the sixties to the present day. This volume is devoted to Simonetta Colonna di Cesarò, aristocratic protagonist of this renewal.
The critical essays bring the figure, the style and the cultural world of the couturière into synergistic focus, revealing her many different facets. While Maria Luisa Frisa presents Simonetta in the guise of the inspiring muse of contemporary fashion design, Judith Clark analyzes her makeup in the theatricalized language of the exhibition space. Vittoria C. Caratozzolo stresses the way in which Simonetta’s “fashion-creation” bears witness, against the backdrop of an increasingly ineluctable process of standardization of appearance, to the persistence of the aspiration to individuality that had once been the exclusive prerogative of the dandy.