How Italy put sex into style

"A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.” So said Sophia Loren, and we all know the sort of vista she was talking about: a generous swell of cleavage, hip and bottom that leaves stylish women awestruck and strong men faint.

Never was the look better demonstrated, or the view clearer, than in 1994, when Elizabeth Hurley donned Versace’s scrap of fabric held together by safety pins, before sashaying her way down the red carpet into instant stardom. Contrast and compare with a more recent, much-snapped outfit. Last week, Keira Knightley was photographed at Chanel’s fashion show in one of the French fashion house’s key spring looks. Her waist was cinched in by an ugly black waspie, and a box-cut white top gave her the shoulders of a Bulgarian shot-put champion. The poor woman’s shapeless white skirt billowed above knobbly knees and made her legs and arms look like toothpicks. To misquote the divine Dolly Parton, it costs a lot of money to look that gauche.

How much better Knightley would have looked, when you consider her resemblance to Audrey Hepburn, in the Valentino often favoured by the gamine star. But then, Valentino Garavani’s belief was that women “want to be beautiful”, while “Coco” Chanel had other concerns: “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.” In other words, you must avoid looking overtly sexy at all costs, even if that means turning radiant women into gawky frumps.

The Italians have never shied away from a little, or even a great heap, of vulgarity. From Bulgari to Roberto Cavalli, more is always more, and bling and bosoms rule the roost. So it gladdens my heart to know the Victoria and Albert Museum is paying homage to the magnificent spectacle of Italian costume with a glitzy show, The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014. From the seminal Sala Bianca catwalk shows held in Florence in the Fifties (organised by Giovanni Battista Giorgini to propose Italy as a rival to Paris), to Gucci, Pucci and newer talents such as Pierpaolo Piccioli, this will be the most comprehensive exposition of Italian style ever staged.

More than that, it should prove to be joyous, because pure, unadulterated lust for life is what Italy exports best to the rest of the world. The Italians gave us the Renaissance, then followed that up with the world’s finest cars, women and cuisine – all of which pleasures are linked. Ferraris demand a beauteous co-driver, while the curves of Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale and Monica Bellucci suggest both an Alfa Romeo’s flanks and a spot of peasant cuisine. When the Naples-born Loren was asked the secret of her figure, she replied: “Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti.” No wonder Italy became the first country to ban size-zero models in 2006: this is a nation that worships food, flesh and sensuality.

The carefree voluptuousness of Italian starlets proved infectious in the Fifties and Sixties, when their American counterparts crossed the pond to Rome’s Cinecittà Studios to take advantage of the romantic setting and cheaper production costs. Hepburn filmed Roman Holiday there in 1953 and looked every bit the native in her tight white shirt and full skirt, perched on a Vespa. Canny Salvatore Ferragamo arranged for Hepburn to be photographed visiting his Florentine store to purchase shoes.

Elizabeth Taylor looked even more at home a decade later when filming Cleopatra. She was pursued by the press pack along Rome’s Via del Babuino, sporting both beehive and opulent gems.

So fond was Taylor of her favourite jeweller that Richard Burton once joked: “The only word Liz knows in Italian is Bulgari.” It’s no surprise that the word “paparazzi” (named after the news photographer in La Dolce Vita) was coined during this age of ostentatious glamour.

Like Taylor, Hepburn and Loren, I have a deep-seated faith that Italian style flatters the form like no other. Anyone who’s ever tried on one of Dolce & Gabbana’s slinky corseted frocks will know how it feels to move from mortal to goddess in 10 seconds. The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson looked delectable in one of their dresses at a mutual friend’s wedding last weekend. She said: “Dolce & Gabbana are in love with feminine. I wear my black ruched satin dress more than any I have ever owned. It lends you such a sense of ease and voluptuousness.” Even the bride was in a lovely, sexy sheath of Dolce & Gabbana lace that day: figure-skimming with the faintest, naughtiest suggestion of underlying nudity.

The Italian fashion house’s ads signal this alchemy. The March issue of Vogue carries a glorious advertisement for Dolce & Gabbana that shows four laughing, leggy, bosomy models being offered oranges by a couple of lascivious tradesmen. The symbolism is obvious – a sort of reverse Nell Gwyn – and utterly delightful: my ripe fruit for your ripe fruit. Contrast all that lush sensuality with the three scowling, slouching waifs in one Chanel ad, or the sexless man and woman wearing pristine white in a Michael Kors image, disembarking from a plane while they studiously ignore one another. Call me tacky and obvious, but I don’t want to live in a world where fashion is about looking a part, but not about living it.

I’m hardly alone in my preference for the bella figura, which can be loosely translated as the art of making a fabulous impression. Remember Nigella Lawson striding into court in December looking just like Loren? Lawson’s trademark pencilled brows, billowing tresses and bombshell dresses are pure Italian glamour circa 1963, which is why men worship her and women want to be her.

The most stylish woman I know, the novelist Christobel Kent, who owns a flat in Florence, declares that she owes everything to Italy: “When I went to live in Modena in the 1980s, I was a standard-issue English Lit graduate. I wore grubby plimsolls, socks and dungaree dresses and went braless. At that time, the extraordinary Italian tradition of the passeggiata was at its height: every evening between four and seven, the crowds would parade up and down the Via Emilia checking each other out, and all the women would be dressed to the nines – pompadoured, high heels, skin-tight skirts, hoiked bosom – and men would blow them kisses

and tell them their breasts were like doves. They would stare at me, on the other hand, as though I had escaped from the lunatic asylum. By the end, I had conformed, quite happily, and was wearing body-con dresses in jewel colours, high-heeled sandals, push-up bra and low-cut tops.”

Kent says people jeered at her in the street on her return to England for making such an overt effort. Nevertheless, the Italian lesson went deep. In her forties, after the birth of her five children, she resurrected her inner siren and is now rarely seen without feline kohl, spray-on pencil skirts and teetering heels. She points out: “Age is absolutely no barrier in Italy. Even elderly women will wear fitted skirts and have cascading, highlighted hair. Women in Italy are for being sexy: once you stop making that effort, you might as well creep off and die.”

This philosophy is evident in Paolo Sorrentino’s stupendous extravaganza, La Grande Bellezza, which took the Oscar for best foreign-language film this year. Almost all the coiffed and couture-trussed female characters are in their fifties, including the buxom pole-dancer Ramona. The movie is set in a Rome that’s half-Spanish Steps and half-nightclub. Vulgarity is both a source of terrific vitality and looming ennui, as Sorrentino documents the beguiling contradictions of the Italian soul. But then, this is a nation that promotes extravagance and piety on equal footing.

If there’s anywhere more camply opulent than the Vatican City, I have yet to see it. The garb of traditional popes was velvet capes, fur trim and solid gold crosses. Pope Benedict XVI even brought back the tradition for red shoes, symbolising the spilt blood of martyrs, and rumour swiftly had it that they were Prada – in fact, they were custom-made by Antonio Arellano, Benedict’s personal cobbler at Gammarelli.

Of course, gaudy glitz isn’t the only note to Italian fashion, even if the more restrained (some might say dull) taupe trouser suits of Giorgio Armani and witty conceptual flair of Miuccia Prada often seem more the exception than the rule. When you buy Italian, you buy into an extraordinary heritage of artisanal skill. The painstaking arts of leatherwork, embroidery, knitwear and fine fabric manufacture have been preserved across the country to an unrivalled degree. No one disputes that if you seek the most exquisite shoes, belts and bags in the world, they will be made there. Peer inside the clothes of various British designers, including Vivienne Westwood, and you will see their most beautifully constructed garments are manufactured in Italy.

This embarrassment of atelier skills – not to mention the enchanting beauty of art and architecture that is part of everyday Italian life – has a knock-on effect on everyday life. Even the uniforms of Italian soldiers and carabinieri are far more elegant than those of their European neighbours. The solidarity of national style is such that Italian women will never be seen dashing around in a group in ballet flats or, heaven forbid, Converse sneakers.

Stephen Bayley, the style guru who wrote La Dolce Vita: The Golden Age of Italian Style, perhaps puts it best: “The Italians, it is often said, have not separated art from life. The concept of bella figura confirms this: everyone is on parade all the time and everywhere. In Verona or Catania, bedroom and the catwalk, the street and the salone are not so very different.”

Which is why women who love sex, stockings and spaghetti will always worship at the shrine of Italian glamour.

'The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014’ is at the Victoria and Albert Museum (020 7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk) from April 5 to July 27