Fashion and Tourism in Campania in the Middle of the Twentieth Century: a Story with Many Protagonists

Abstract

In the last decades a large number of Italian tourist destinations have become increasingly popular thanks to the growth of purchase as a consolidated habit of collective tourism, and to the identification of many sites as upscale shopping centers. For such resorts, this trend has turned into a tool for promotion comparable to art, landscape and food. This phenomenon developed in particular in Capri, Ischia and Positano, where between the Fifties and Sixties, thanks to the initiative of local artisans or shrewd foreigner visitors, tailor’s shops, boutiques and workshops were created in response to the customers’ requests for clothes and accessories tuned to the native ‘style’. The authenticity of this process was originally guaranteed by the strong consolidated artisan tradition of the sites and found a favorable conjuncture in the fact that in the middle of the century fashion was combined with tourism and cinema to help Italy out of the post-war crisis. Thanks to its folklore and natural landscape heritage connected to the beauty of its coast, Naples acted as a main trigger for this project: it boasted suitable productive, cultural and economic conditions to aspire to become the "capital of fashion in southern Italy" and Capri, Ischia and Positano were the ideal stages through which the new facet of Italian creativity could be conveyed.