UCLA

This dissertation examines fur garments, hats, and gloves in Italian visual arts, literature, and cinema as sartorial signifiers that shape, reflect and express the complexity and transformations of female identity. Referring back to the cultural history of these accessories since the early modern era, it traces their mutations from the turn-of-the century paradigm of the femme fatale to modes of feminist self-fashioning. Drawing on Barthes’s semiotics of dress and situated within a feminist and psychoanalytic framework, this study examines how garments simultaneously reinforce and challenge cultural norms, functioning as instruments of conformity, transgression and self-definition. Each chapter follows one accessory across painting, literature, and film. The chapter on fur traces its transformation from a marker of aristocratic status into an emblem of seduction, luxury, and power through portraits by Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, Boldini’s portraits of the Marchesa Casati, d’Annunzio’s prose, and Contessa Lara’s character Leona in L’innamorata, whose fur garments signify both status and entrapment. It examines Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore and Le amiche, revealing fur’s ambivalent capacity to confer visibility while positioning women as objects of spectacle. The chapter on hats considers the accessory as both a mask and a marker of identity, moving from the veil as a sign of modesty to the Surrealist experiments of Schiaparelli and Fini, as well as Térésah’s character Delia, whose knitted beret transforms a masculine emblem of authority into a sign of intellectual autonomy. Films by Antonioni and Fellini demonstrate the hat’s dual function as an instrument of patriarchal regulation and a medium of self-fashioning. Informed by feminist theories of fetishism, the chapter on gloves traces their movement from Renaissance ceremonial authority to bodily agency in d’Annunzio’s Elena and Antonioni’s Paola. It argues that these women appropriate the fetish object, transforming an instrument of male desire into a means of articulating their own desires. Each chapter in its conclusion also considers briefly contemporary and postmodern feminist takes on the accessories by female designers and artists such as Miuccia Prada, Silva Bruschini and Anna Franceschini. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that these accessories can challenge power structures governing gendered roles by associating the pleasure conveyed through dress with autonomous femininity. Rather than reading these garments as instruments of sexualized and commodified spectacle, this study shows how the interaction among body, textile, and self-expression contributes to the construction of female identity and agency across Italian culture.