Paninari

Italian youth movement: a fashion and lifestyle phenomenon that filled the Italian news programs for a good part of the 1980s. Born around a bar in the centre of Milan (Il Panino, from which the name comes) they were middle-class young men aged between 15 and 25, typified by their style of dress, party-loving, and totally noncommittal attitude. Their Roman counterparts were rough types from a lower social class, also dedicated to the way they dressed, but with less attention to detail. The Milanese Paninari had a real uniform: a Moncler puffa jacket, Armani jeans, Timberland boots, and the classic Burlington colored check socks. With hindsight, they were the pure incarnation of the show-off spirit of the 1980s. They traveled around on fancy motorbikes, and had a slang all of their own, but their most distinctive trait was that of hanging around in groups in the city center. They usually gathered outside fast food joints and the trendiest clubs where they listened to their preferred dance music. The media became enamoured of them, especially in 1984, and the phenomenon was subjected to a thorough analysis — especially the clothes — as the trend caught on with young people all over Italy. They had their own official publications, their own comics, and hundreds of pages dedicated to them in mass-distributed magazines. They found a solid point of reference in the emerging TV network Fininvest (particularly the channel Italia 1 with its afternoon light-entertainment programmes). The phenomenon was already on the decline after a few years: in 1987 there was no longer any trace of the true Paninari, but the movement’s founding philosophies found favour with a very wide range of young people.