Overview
Between unification and the Second World War, Italy had the industry for fashion and not the authority. Silk from Como, wool from Biella and Prato, straw hats from Tuscany and a deep tailoring tradition all supplied a market whose taste was set in Paris — and the attempt to change that became, in the 1930s, a matter of government policy.
Key garments and style
Elite dress followed French lines throughout, with Italian houses working as makers and copyists rather than originators.
The Fascist regime attacked this on two fronts. An official body was set up in Turin in the 1930s — later the Ente Nazionale della Moda — to certify and promote Italian design, with rules requiring a proportion of Italian content in garments sold as national products. And autarky pushed domestic fibres: rayon from Italian plants, and lanital, a fibre spun from milk casein, developed and produced in Italy and promoted heavily as a patriotic substitute for imported wool.
The results were mixed and the taste-setting largely failed, but the apparatus of shows, certification and industrial promotion was real, and so was the manufacturing base behind it.
Transition
After 1945 that base was still standing, and it is what the Florence shows of 1951 and the Milan ready-to-wear industry were built on.