All About That Skirt:
Women’s sportswear in 1920-1940s’ Fascist Italy
Part 2

 

Talking about the recent campaign for the reintroduction of the bodysuit by the Australia basketball team, Felicity Smith underlined that, although it was a controversial decision (someone claimed that ‘the switch to tighter fitting suits for the women’s team alone could be seen as exclusionary’), it was taken not by Federation but by the players themselves, the same one who had chosen to remove bodysuits in 2008 (see https://sirensport.com.au/op-ed/uniforms-have-more-meaning-than-what-we-wear/ ). Did Italian athletes had any kind of control over their sports uniforms in 1920s’ Italy? Did they played any role in that fashion anarchy? We don’t know. What we do know is that that anarchy was going to end, as with any kind of social freedom in Fascist Italy, a country where the regime was slowly turning everything towards some ideological goal. Because of the 1928 controversy between the Church and the regime on the occasion of the Concorso ginnico-atletico, about which there will be more discussion later in this article, the Italian Federation of Athletics (FIDAL) decided to have a clampdown: it defended the right of the athletes to compete in shorts, but it yielded to the pressure from the pro conservatives concerning what happened before and after the sporting events. In May 1932 FIDAL sent out a memo intimating the women’s athletes not to go outside the sporting arena unless they were wearing long trousers; while competing, the girls must not wear shorts that were too short, nor short-sleeved shirts. The first order wasn’t so speculative: some years before, the young Vittorina Vivenza was reported to the Bishop of Aosta for arriving at the stadium already dressed in her athletic shorts.

We can see this new policy in action as it were by viewing the photographs from the international meetings in which the Italian National Team competed. In 1933 Ondina Valla and her team-mates were still wearing the very long white skirts when they paraded on the pitch with the National flag; in 1934, they adopted long trousers, while their opponents were wearing shorts. It wasn’t until 1935 that the Italians decided to align their outfit.

The first-ever Italian women’s basketball team was founded in Siena, in 1907, by PE teacher Ida Nomi Pesciolini: but it didn’t pull the trigger on the birth of a national movement, which only started in the early Twenties, spreading out from the gymnastics society in Northern Italy. As soon as possible, the Italian basketball players switched from the traditional gymnastic outfit (including tights) to the more practical shorts.

In April 1923 the Women’s Olympiad took place in Monte Carlo, Monaco. When the Pro Patria players competed against their Czechoslovakian opponents, the first wore shorts, the latter skirts: at that time, Italy was at the cutting edge, compared with the Eastern Europe country. Some years later, roles would to be reversed …

Moving on to 29 July 1928, when the Italy National Team played a match in Milan against the “Canada National Team”, which was the Commercial Graduates Basketball Club from Edmonton. There was a huge debacle: the hosts won 62 – 2! What’s interesting for us is that, despite the difference in the quality of their game, both Italy and Canadians wore shorts; the Italian added an headbands and the Canadians, knee pads.

Still in April 1930, the players of the National Team posing for a photograph wearing shorts, prior to the match against France: it was the last time they would do so…

When the Canottieri Milano team, playing as a sort of Italy National Team (they were Italian Champions), defeated a Swiss “National Team” (July 1933), they were playing in skirts, as they are used to do during the National Championship from 1932 (maybe 1931, while in 1930 players was still wearing shorts: see  https://twitter.com/calciatrici1933/status/1079363960212738049 ).

The passage from 1920s’ shorts to 1930’s skirts was a sort of sea change, because it coincided with the increase of Italian girls, assisted by aid from the regime. During this decade, basketball was encouraged by all the women’s Fascist associations (ONB, OND and GUF) and seen as the perfect female team sport. Women from all over the country (including small towns, and even the colonies in Africa! see –   https://twitter.com/calciatrici1933/status/1138040625889251328) were introduced to it, and their skirts became one of the visual symbols of 1930s and 1940s Italian donna nuova.

Medal of a Giovani Fasciste championship (1937) on the left and on the right a medal of an unknown championship (no date) Source: https://bit.ly/34K1G9e

The most symbolic moment of the 1930’s/1940s’ Italian women’s basketball movement was the gold medal at the European Championship, won in Rome in 1938: the azzurre were the only players in skirts, all their opponents played in shorts.

Photographs can help us understand that not all basketball skirts were the same: they were different in colour, shape … and length! In the picture of the 1933 Final Match: the Canottieri Milano players’ skirts are knee-length, while the AP Napoli skirt is much longer, almost level with the socks

We can see the same difference in the picture of the first-ever women’s basketball match in Lodi between the “apostles” from Milan and the local players, so we can maybe assume that the difference between medium length skirts and longer ones was not related to pure geographical difference (Northern cities vs. Central and Southern ones), but perhaps more to social evolution. Probably the Milanese players were more open-minded to wearing a medium length skirts (women from Turin and Trieste played in shorts, in the 1930 Final Match), as we can see from the late 1930’s and 1940’s Ambrosiana team picture where former footballer Rosetta Boccalini played (see https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/articles/football/and-then-we-were-boycotted-new-discoveries-about-the-birth-of-womens-football-in-italy-1933-part-7/ ). The players confidence was maybe weaker and/or the team managers bigotry bigger in rural towns such as Lodi or in the more conservative city of Central and above all Southern Italy. Although we’re are referring to a general trend and not hard and fast rule (see for example the very long skirt worn in 1937 by players from Trieste and Venice, two of the most open-minded Italian cities at that time: https://twitter.com/calciatrici1933/status/1331182296154726400 ), this explanation seems to be valid even after WW2. In a history of women’s basketball in Novellara, a small country town near Modena, we can read that after 1945 local players didn’t feel confident enough to play in shorts as the Modena players did: so they were still wearing skirts …

One may wonder how the women could have played in these skirts: the analysis of some of the pictures can help us in shedding light on this topic. In fact, basketball skirts were not simple sottane ‘skirt’, but sottane-pantalone, a kind of skirt with a internal slit: so similar to culottes.

The sottana-pantalone was exactly the last kit of the GFC footballers (see bit.ly/2NBMzZg ). As we have previously seen, since they had established the first-ever Italian women’s football team (1933), the Milanese girls wore skirts exclusively, although the Italian press who was for the most part were against them, loved to depicte them as lascivious girls in shorts.

Rosetta, Ninì, Brunilde, Losanna and their friends started to play wearing their ordinary everyday skirts, as we can see from the different shapes and colour, but soon they realized that they needed something more practical for the game.

A further practical problem was that during the team picture the players seated in the front row were trying desperately to cover their legs, in order to avoid ‘improper poses’ …

In April 1933 the players found a solution, ordering (probably thanks to Margherita Loverro’s father, who was the owner of a sportswear shop) a stock of dark sottane-pantalone [culottes or divided skirts]

Even in the case of the 1933 footballers we don’t really know is they were forced to play in skirts, or if they decided to do so. What is sure is that their sottane-pantalone were more practical than the white short skirts adopted by some Dutch amateur footballers of FC de Rakt team, who some years ago (2008) had asked the local Federation for the right to play in skirts (see https://t.co/L262qywP9m?amp=1 ) … in fact, they had to wear additional shorts underneath!

Before talking about what happened towards the end of the Twenties, we should return to the middle of the decade, when the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) was founded. Because of the totalitarian need to control everyone, the Youth Fascist Association, led by Renato Ricci, was open not only to boys but also to girls, who were divided into Figlie della Lupa (>6 years), Piccole Italiane (6-14 years) and Giovani Italiane (16-18 years).

In Ricci’s ideology, there should be no confusion about the gender roles of future mothers and soldiers, as we can see not only looking at the different activities (Giovani Italiane attended childcare and home economics courses, while their peer Avanguardisti were taught to use rifles), but also at the different uniforms. The basic distinction between the Balilla (boys from 6 to 14 years) and Piccole Italiane was that the first wore shorts, the second a dark skirt.

On May 24th not only was there a huge ONB meeting in every Italian city, but also a specific ceremony, called Leva Fascista, by which every 14-years-old Piccola Italiana became Giovane Italiana: her skirts became a little longer, and her tights darker, as every respectable young lady was expected to do.

The 1938 Leva Fascista in Rome, Bologna and Milan.   Source: https://youtu.be/K0_ZHy3rzLM

Piccole and Giovani Italiane uniform were a different kind of uniform from the one worn in school: the difference being that the ONB uniform could have military-type stripes. It was the first time that Italian women were allowed to wear stripes: please remember that just some years later, in 1943, Italian women would fight during the war, for the Resistance (partigiane) or for the Fascist Repubblica Sociale Italiana (ausiliarie). Probably one of the reasons for such a seemingly incomprehensible fact: a lot of women interviewed after 1945 about their youth during the regime remembered how they wished to get that uniform, which was a real uniform … something that their older sisters and mothers weren’t allowed to dream of.

Sports was one of the main activity encouraged by ONB: simple games for Piccole Italiane, more complex games (basketball, sometimes volleyball) and sports (gymnastics, athletics, swimming, skiing, ice-skating …) for Giovani Italiane.

For some of these activities (i.e. the annual collective gymnastic choreography), the uniform remained the same, but they were allowed to change their long tights to short white socks, and dark shoes to some more comfortable tennis shoes. In the most conservative part of the Kingdom of Italy, such as inner Sicily, these short socks were perceived as a scandal: as told by Sergio Giuntini in his La rivoluzione del corpo (p. 55), in 1935 the Bishop of Noto complained because the high school female students in Modica were asked to play during a public gymnastic event in front of the audience with their tights pulled down, showing their naked legs.

Talking about tights, remember the outfit of the very young Giovani Pavesi, the local team from Pavia which competed at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam as the Italian National Team and won the Olympic silver medal – the only one in 93 years for Italian women’s gymnastics, before the 30-years old Vanessa Ferrari broke this curse some days ago! Although they trained bare-legged, for their Olympic performance their wore white tights, unlike their Dutch opponents who finally won the gold medal.

The fact was that, during that summer of 1928, a heated debate regarding sportswomen’s outfits broke out, unleashing several negative responses from the conservative-revolutionary Fascist regime.

From 4 to 6 May 1928 the ONB organized the first-ever Concorso ginnico-atletico ‘Gymnastics and Athletics Competition’ for the Giovani Italiane, who were called upon to gather in Rome from all over Italy: Mussolini himself would attend the event and to award the winners their medals!

Pope Pius XI, who was a keen hiker himself but who also disapproved of women’s sport, wrote to the Vicar of Rome Cardinal Pompilj, not only complaining about the fact that in the Holy Capital City of Catholicism such a male and warrior-like activity such as shooting was included in the individual program (which included a hurdles race and javelin throw), but also underlining the immorality of throwing those innocent and pure young females to an adult male audience, in similar fashion as to what happened in ancient Greece and Rome. Some months later, Fascist Italy and the Catholic Church finally signed the Lateran Treaty, which settled the long-standing Roman Question. But the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Fascist regime about the body and the outfits of young Italian sportswomen had only just begun.

The Fascist regime had a quite paradoxical policy about Italian society. On one hand, it was very traditional, as with any right-wing dictatorship: despite all the images of individual, intellectual, and sexual freedom coming from abroad (especially the USA and UK), Italian girls must keep to the old ideals, which can be summarized in the “wife and mother” slogan. On the other hand, the regime didn’t want to seem outdated: what Mussolini did in 1922 with his Marcia su Roma was not told by the propaganda as a simple restoration, but as a real revolution. The ancient Roman civilization was an ideal model, not a goal: the rich Italian historical tradition was meant to be used to build a new, updated country that could compete with and even conquer the ‘corrupted’ Western liberal and capitalistic countries. It was the dream of a ‘third path’, which led not only to a uomo nuovo ‘new man’ but also to a donna nuova: a ‘new woman’ that, in spite of her primary maternal duties, was also was expected to be more active than her mother and grandmother, who spent their lives virtually tied to the home. The illustrator of Cordelia, one of the most important ladies’ magazine of that time, can help us with some visual images of these ideals. In the annual Almanacco of 1933, he depicted the American woman as a golfer and the British as a tennis player, both slim; the Italian mother, a little more chubby, and with her two children, but wearing a fashionable suit, not a traditional or regional one.

 

Talking about fashion and censorship, this ‘third path’ was really problematic. The Italian newspapers and magazines had to give their readers information and images showing what women wore and how they lived abroad: a total censorship would seem absurd; as a counterbalance, the Italian press loved to rail against that donna-crisi ‘crisis-woman’ too thin, too free, too independent. But female readers were free to see such images, realizing that outside Italy there was another way to be a woman …

In the late Twenties and Thirties, in particular, there was a new female ideal that occupied the pages of Italian ladies’ magazines: the Hollywood actress. Italian readers were literally bombarded by articles and above all images (coming from US press agencies) regarding these beautiful, rich, and somewhat vain women, who lived in that overseas paradise. The fact was that sports was one of the primary elements of the Hollywood diva model: they loved it, they practised it, during interviews they explained how it helped them to shape their bodies, and even to find an husband!