Cederna
Camilla (1911-1997). Italian journalist. A great name in the period after World War II, she made her début in 1939 on the Milanese newspaper L’Ambrosiano, later working with L’Europeo, L’Espresso, and Il Corriere della Sera. She also published several books. As a result of the massacre at Piazza Fontana in Milan (December 12th 1969), she devoted a large portion of her career to the themes of civil and political commitment, from an investigation of the death of the anarchist Pinelli (1971) to the 1978 files about Giovanni Leone, the president of Italy, to the memories collected in Il mondo di Camilla (Feltrinelli Pub., 1980). Fashion has been a leitmotiv throughout her journalism career, and was an interest already apparent in her graduation thesis entitled Sermons Against the Luxury of Women from the Greek Philosophers to the Church Fathers. It also figured in her very first piece published by the Corriere della Sera on September 7th 1943 at the end of the Badoglio period and just before the return of the Fascists: Black Fashion was a short fashion sketch about the women of the party, starting with Claretta Petacci. Between 1946 and 1956, at L’Europeo under the leadership of Arrigo Benedetti, she followed the activities of the great Milan ateliers: the pioneering phase of Palazzo Pitti, and the Balmain and Dior Collections in Paris. She wrote about Maria Callas and her education in elegance at Biki’s atelier. At the same time, and this is what made her original, she observed and recorded “the art of clothing,” as she called it, the proprieties of style and the exhibitionist blunders related to fashion. She contributed an essay to the Collection Milano ha cinquant’anni published in 1950 by Rinascente with the long article How Milanese Gentlemen Dress, in which she praised their “conformism, a result of good traditions,” consecrated by the Prandoni jackets “which until a few years ago served as a model for the great tailors of London.” Along with Cederna’s article there is Irene Brin’s How Milanese Ladies Dress. In February 1956, she reported for L’Europeo on the cruise to New York made by the “eight Italian ladies” (Consuelo Crespi above all) of noble origin and mannequin size” organized by Giovanni Battista Giorgini to present to American women the styles of the great Milanese and Roman tailors such as Schuberth, Marucelli, Capucci, and Veneziani. Shortly after, she followed the director Benedetti when he founded L’Espresso, and wrote the fashion column Il Lato Debole (The Weak Side), which was hers until 1976. Each week, she wrote about the continent of high society, the salons, the years of restoration, profiteering, the deafening economic miracle, and ostentatious clothes for the opera at La Scala: the habits, stereotypes, languages, manias, elegance, and the boorishness of “fashion’s men and women.” Sketches by Brunetta accompanied her articles. Guido Vergani wrote: “She is a young lady of good family, capable of a smiling nastiness, of acid expressions wrapped in prose only apparently frivolous..From her stinging blows, devoid of violence and mostly camouflaged by mercy, emerged the healthy moralism of the enlightened Lombardy bourgeoisie, the one of Pietro Verri and Carlo Cattaneo, and the sense of humor of the Milanese people.” Besides, the thousand pages (Bompiani, 3 vv., 1977) in which those articles were collected offer not only a source for the social phenomenology of fashion, but also a precious description of trends enriched by a descriptive mastery of fabrics, shapes, cuts, and decoration. These include the still spontaneous fashions of the late 1950s, such as the “wrappers, or scarves, of the English students” worn with tailored suits and satin ankle boots, the advent of reassuring standards such as the “black sheath dress” that was considered “the best rind for a more or less quiet evening,” and “the colonial style which in Summer is always ok.” She also described anti-fashion ostentations such as the gradual revival of the “rigid and square shoulders of Caraceni’s 1950’s style,” the ‘exotic folklore imported by “modernist women” of the 1950s, the “platform shoes instead of Chanel,” and the jeans that were considered populist icons, provided they were “gloriously soft and light-blue/white.” Several other signs of the careful eye she cast on fashion are scattered in the articles about La Scala premières, a privileged observation point. In the mid 1950s, the large Milanese ateliers favored tapering dresses and chinchilla stoles. In 1963 “one could see ladies wrapped in gold and rust-colored mantles” as in a famous painting by Carpaccio, and “girls wearing a green cape over another longer cloak with boots.” During the 1970s, she enumerated: “the Chinese style: blouse and large pants,” “the Amazon in tweed jacket,” “the ‘after-a-day-on-the-ski-runs’ woman: open-work knitwear as evening wear,” turbans, matelassé patchworks (“producing also a teapot-cover effect”), “real or fake lesbians: sturdy shoes.” She rarely expresses esteem, as in a quick objection to the Système de la Mode by Roland Barthes, in 1968: “In one respect the fashionable woman differs decisively from the models of mass culture: she doesn’t know evil. Fashion never talks about love, it doesn’t know unfaithfulness, personal relationships, or flirts: in fashion, you travel only with your husband.” Rather, her idea of fashion can be summed up in this “formula for a quiet elegance” offered specifically for a long ago December 7th on the occasion of a première at La Scala: “Then, the dress can be in one single piece but look like it’s made of two, but it must always inspire a melancholic and solemn nocturnal grace. A long and tight skirt with two small vents, if not slightly barrel-shaped, of heavy crème, in pearl or smoked gray satin, complete with a jacket or a bolero in black gaietto right to the waist, with drops pouring down like wonderful ink. Boat neck, short sleeves, black pearls sewn like a net, in flowers or stars, on organza or tulle.” Camilla Cederna returned to writing about fashion in the 1980s, during the most aggressive phase of the transformation of the clothing industry, of the market, and of its creative trends. Annoyed by exhibitionisms, banalities, and by the abused language of “Made in Italy,” she retired from the media-organizing “war” of the Collections and from “contemporary lookism” (De Gustibus, Mondadori, 1986). Other works by her include La voce dei padroni (1962), Signore e Signori (1966), Maria Callas (Longanesi, 1968), Le pervestite (Immordino, 1968), Milano in guerra, with Marilea Somaré and Martina Vergani (Feltrinelli, 1979), and, published by Mondatori in 1987, Il meglio di Camilla Cederna.