The chapter discusses the state of international fashion and its circulation in 1944, as the war slowly drew to a close. It introduces some key figures who will appear later in other chapters, such as department store director Stanley Marcus, journalists Carmel Snow, Bettina Ballard and Marya Mannes, and socialite and fashion designer Simonetta Visconti. Their relevance is discussed here in terms of their contribution to the earliest discussions of the emerging novelty of Italian fashion as it appeared in US fashion columns and magazines before the end of the war. The chapter chronicles relevant appearances and mentions of Italian fashion in American fashion magazines. It focuses on Rome as the narrative was subjected to the latest developments of the war: liberated in June 1944, Rome became the first Italian city to have a fashion scene worth mentioning. It presents a brief account of the fashion houses that continued to operate, such as Gabriellasport; contextualises them with reports from the Italian fashion magazine Bellezza, which was still linked to the Fascist administration, and the supporting fashion houses based in northern Italy; and finally outlines the tropes often used by American journalists to describe products (leather accessories and sandals), people (Italian female socialites), and their characteristics (the timeless grace of the nobility, the hardworking stamina of the artisans). This, in turn, begins the rehabilitation that Italians need as a country to emerge on the international fashion market as a solid commercial and political ally of the United States.

Present-day book bans of graphic novels demonstrate the power of word and image to communicate together. Well into the twenty-first century, images are still considered to be one of the most dangerous methods of speech because, like the theatre, they primarily rely on readers’ understanding of the gesture and expression of bodies and faces, which are legible to populations considered particularly impressionable and dangerous to the long-term interests of the state. Daumier negotiated changing censorship laws during his career and offered an instructive set of case studies for the sublimation of ideas during periods when promised freedoms were revoked. A frequent theme that he underscored was power: who wields it, how it is taught, how it is accessed, what it masks, its general type and specific contours. Daumier was one of the sharpest theorists and canniest actors exploring the boundaries of speech, subversive revival, and creative disobedience – questions that remain open and urgent today.

The Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today exhibition played a crucial role in promoting Made in Italy imports to the United States and in reviving their modernity in foreign markets. The chapter contributes to this perspective by explaining how the exhibition was also a significant moment of fashion promotion during the postwar years, consolidating Italian originality and opening doors for a wider appreciation of Italian fashion in the United States. There are five sections analysing the exhibition in terms of its contribution to fashion history. These explain the selection of fashion merchandise on display and how it evolved as it travelled through twelve major American museums. In particular, the chapter presents a detailed analysis of the San Francisco and Brooklyn exhibitions’ legs, shedding light on previously unacknowledged accessories by Ferragamo and Roberta di Camerino exhibited there. The findings of this research provide a more comprehensive understanding of Italy at Work and the so far unrecognised impact of fashion trends in its constant redevelopment through the twelve steps of its three-year tour, between 1950 and 1953. Eventually, the chapter explores the intricate power dynamics between the organizers, the various intermediaries, and the US fashion market, along with the impact of Italy at Work on the career of commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini and the genesis of the Italian High Fashion Shows in Florence.

Honoré Daumier’s first paintings appeared on the walls of his prison cell. In 1832 he received a six-month sentence for exciting hatred against and offending the person of the king for the caricature Gargantua, a brutal condemnation of the king’s corruption. In his cell he defiantly rendered Gargantua again, a first act of painting that was a statement of contemporary political speech made through the force of a well-known literary motif. Daumier’s father, a glazier who aspired to be a poet and playwright, was an important source for the artist’s deep and abiding interest in literature and the theatre. This chapter examines formative moments in Daumier’s early career, including the very real consequences of censorship laws on the young artist and the explosion of the book industry that developed innovative new ways to marry word and image.

This chapter describes how the effectiveness of fashion promotion in Italy was undermined by the disjointed and disorganised fashion councils in Turin, Milan and Rome. Like Giorgini, the councils were indeed concerned with the development of foreign trade and, in particular, the establishment of permanent arrangements with the US fashion market. The chapter therefore provides evidence of a network of intermediaries and fashion professionals competing for the same goal: to make Italian fashion profitable as an export and to establish its permanence on the international market. The councils in Turin, Milan and Rome are thus presented as predecessors and competitors of Giorgini's private organisation, each characterised by a specific configuration of interests: the ‘American colony’ in Rome, linked to film stars and the cinema industry; the industrial scene of Milan and its skilled dressmakers; and the reconstitution of the remnants of a Fascist fashion council in Turin, the city that was once the only legitimised fashion capital of Italy. Despite the contrasts among the different fashion councils, the chapter eventually demonstrates the previously unnoticed first attempt to introduce an original Italian couture collection by the American department store J.L. Hudson’s in Detroit in 1949. Finally, the chapter presents the dressmakers and fashion firms that caught the attention of the American press before 1951, names who would in a few months take part in the early establishments of Giorgini’s Italian High Fashion Shows.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s novel Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, was an enormously popular cultural phenomenon in nineteenth-century France, appearing in numerous translations as well as plays, operas, and illustrations. In the last two decades of his life, Daumier created nearly 30 paintings and 40 drawings inspired by the novel. This chapter pays particularly close attention to Don Quixote and the dead mule from 1867 which serves as a pivot for an analysis of Daumier’s engagement with Cervantes’s satire. In Dead mule, Daumier blends expressionistic brushstrokes with the stark lines of popular art, echoing the kind of reflexive reference to representation that made Don Quixote the first ‘modern’ novel. The facture of Daumier’s Don Quixote paintings poses questions about individual expression, illusion, deception, and delusion in ways that parallel the themes of Cervantes’s novel. Daumier understood that the drama and humour of the novel depends on the same distance between reality and perception that was at the centre of nineteenth-century debates about art and political expression. He again revived motifs from seventeenth-century literature that carried specific associations with opposition and censorship and mined narratives that emphasized Cervantes’s dangerous critique of the aristocracy and monarchy. Completing the arc of this book’s investigations of Daumier’s painted motifs of literary subjects and the ways in which they embed subversive political ideas, this chapter shows what satire looks like without lightness, that is, when it is brutal, self-reflective, and violent.

The chapter explains how a non-profit agency called Handicraft Development, Inc. was established in the United States with joint efforts from Italians, Americans, and Italian Americans. This agency played a crucial role in helping Italian fashion merchandise emerge in the American market as luxury export goods. The chapter is divided into five sections that explain the multifaceted issues that were overcome. One of the main issues was the perception of American customers towards Italy in the immediate postwar years. Many Americans associated Italy with Fascist models of production and propaganda, which created a negative image of Italian fashion merchandise. Another issue was related to production: Italian handicraft makers needed training and consultancy to learn how to adapt local aesthetics to American consumers. This was important to ensure that Italian fashion merchandise became desirable to the American market. To bolster the reputation of Italian fashion merchandise in the United States, it was deemed necessary to enhance its perceived quality, which would require a corresponding increase in the price. However, it was important to ensure that the price increase did not render the goods unattainable, to maintain accessibility for interested buyers. This was a crucial step in positioning Italian fashion merchandise as a high-end commodity in the American market. The chapter ends by discussing the impact of the House of Italian Handicrafts showroom in New York on promoting Italian fashion as non-competitive to Americans, while also bolstering its artistic tradition.

The chapter begins with an examination of the buying offices and commissionaires in Florence in the first half of the twentieth century, before turning to the Italian branch of Handicraft Development, Inc., CADMA. The latter, directed by the art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and technically managed by Mario Vannini Parenti, provided Handicraft Development, Inc. in New York with samples of handicrafts to be exhibited and promoted to American retailers and buyers. The aim was to advance the cause of Italian artisans and, as it turned out, Italian fashion artisans as well. The chapter then presents a case study of the reintroduction of Ferragamo shoes to the postwar American market, providing new insights into the relationship between the famous shoemaker and CADMA, and how the two intersected through Vannini Parenti personally. This and an additional case study shed light on how for-profit businesses in Florence, such as commissionaires and buying offices, coexisted with HDI and its associated agencies, which instead had non-commercial objectives. Finally, the chapter serves as an introduction to the main protagonist of the book’s analysis, the Tuscan commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini, and to the events that marked his professional biography before the creation of the Italian High Fashion Shows in 1951. Eventually the chapters highlight the similarities between the objectives pursued by Giorgini, Handicraft Development, Inc., and CADMA, all of which aimed to provide Italian artisans with export-oriented production skills, enhanced reputation, and visibility.

The second chapter begins by engaging with some of the most prominent anti-gothic gothic fiction created over the past century: paranoid psycho-geographical fantasy in poems by Iain Sinclair, novels by Peter Ackroyd, essays by Stewart Home and graphic novels by Alan Moore. The potential for such provocative misreadings of the English baroque is shown to have a basis in the architecture itself, and it is suggested that the scope for uncanny sensations opened up by the structures might have much to tell us about the post-modernist baroque revival, the fiction of Sinclair and Moore having as much to do with the Thatcherite renovation of the metropolis as anything in the theory and practice of Nicholas Hawksmoor.