‘Il 1951 riabiliterà le grasse’: rewriting the body in Irene Brin’s fashion journalism

Fashion is an ‘embodied experience’, playing an active role in constructing identities and in mediating bodies and the social world (Entwistle, 2015). Fashion magazines also discursively constitute female bodies and identities, both visually and textually. This article considers Italian fashion journalism of the mid-twentieth century which generally follows this trend of shaping normative ideals of young and slender women, while non-normative bodies are notably absent. At first glance, the popular weekly magazine La Settimana Incom Illustrata delivers this normative vision of women through its images: smiling models wear the latest luxurious creations on their young and thin bodies, embodying aspirational yet often unrealistic beauty standards. Countering this, I will examine the articles of Irene Brin (1911–1969), one of the most important mid-twentieth-century Italian fashion journalists, revealing that her little-studied articles published between 1948 and 1956 in La Settimana Incom Illustrata focus on bodies not usually represented in fashion narratives. Brin’s texts create fictional narratives beyond the rhetoric we may associate with fashion magazines, featuring a plurality of female models, including fat and old women. While elsewhere in this publication are normative visions of female bodies, Brin not only expands the range of female representation, but also reveals the potential of fashion prose to rewrite female bodies in fashion magazines which typically (re)produced gender stereotypes as prescribed by designers. The subversive potential of these articles, which present alternative repre­sentations of non-normative bodies, offers readers the opportunity to reconceptualise and rewrite their relationship with fashion and their own bodies, challenging the status quo.