Italian ready-to-wear fashion through Cori-carousels

Abstract

This chapter is dedicated to a series of short videos for the television advertising programme Carosello, the first Italian TV show dedicated to the promotion of consumer goods broadcast since 1957. In ‘The Italian Ready-to-wear Fashion through the GFT’s carousels’ Giulia Caffaro draws attention to the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile, a key player in the Italian ready-to-wear fashion industry, and its production of shorts between 1964 and 1973 which promoted new female identities. These carousels demonstrate how companies constructed femininity through the use of clothes and their expressiveness, but mainly, through the representation of new role models, performed by new mass celebrities. Ultimately, Caffaro demonstrates the reasons why the collaboration between the ready-to-wear fashion industry and the Italian media channel became so successful.