Whenever I travel, I hunt for vintage magazines and periodicals. No matter if I can read them or not, I love to find more fashion, interior design, men’s, and women’s magazines for my archive. During the many years my parents lived in Florence, I managed to accumulate a pretty great collection of Italian magazines from the 1930s through 1980s—yes, my suitcase was always very overweight, but it was worth it. Magazines provide a window into a society’s values and obsessions, its beliefs and dreams. Comparing them decade to decade, or country to country, allows us to better understand changes over time and differences (and similarities) between places.
Among the Italian magazines I collect is Eva, a weekly women's magazine published between 1933 and 1968. All of the issues I have are from the 1950s, by which it was tabloid size, 32 pages, with a color cover and color central spread. Women’s interests are the focus: fashion, beauty, interior design, housekeeping, marriage, child-rearing, romantic fiction, and advice.
When it launched in 1934, advertisements advised: “Every Italian woman should read it.” It was part of a new style of weekly magazine that appeared in Italy in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, rotocalchi, that focused on more popular content for the mass market. Manuela Di Franco, in her dissertation on popular magazines in Fascist Italy, writes: “In the 1930s, women’s rotocalchi distinguished themselves from these [upmarket] periodicals for their frequency of publication, number of pages, and quality of paper, as well as content: rotocalchi had fewer pages, used a lower quality paper and were published weekly, whereas earlier periodicals, such as Lidel and Sovrana, used glossy paper, had many pages, and were published monthly. These differences were also reflected in the price—a single issue of a women’s rotocalco was cheaper than other women’s periodicals—and the intended readership for the new magazines was clearly extended also to aim at middle class, ‘ordinary’ women.” Rotocalchi were printed using rotogravure, a technique known for high-quality reproduction of images and a fast printing speed, “which allowed high-volume printing of standardised products, making it a cost-effective technique for printing mass-circulation magazines.”
Eva’s most direct competitor was Grazia, launched in 1938 and continuing to this day. Both “had the same purpose: to put the woman at the centre and provide her with useful tips and guidance, to entertain her, inform and reflect her concerns, but always with herself as its reference-point.”
For your viewing pleasure, I scanned the fashion images from the June 16, 1956 issue of Eva. Unlike a fashion magazine like Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, the fashion photos are not congregated into editorials but are dotted throughout the whole magazine, intermingled with stories on detergent and massaging cellulite. This intermixing of images and unrelated text has earlier precedence—the historian Irene Piazzoni, in an article on rotocalchi between the wars, quotes the writer Pitigrilli (Dino Segre) from the first issue of a new series of the periodical Le Grandi Firme (1937): “The public is not content just to read. They want photography. The stadium and the cinema have taught them to look. Amidst columns of type and pure fantasy, they want a few photos, meaning windows open on the world and onto reality.” In Eva, these “windows” are onto an ideal womanhood: perfectly dressed and immaculately made up, with the correct length gloves for the time of day, the perfect hat, the wasp waist. Models are photographed mostly around the streets of Milan, inhabiting the role of the perfect housewife. This ideal is further reinforced by their placement within articles on child-rearing and housekeeping—the perfect home, family, and appearance existing as one, interlinked and inextricable on Eva’s pages.
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