Translating the feminine: the lexicon of fashion as an ideological apparatus in the Italian magazine Dea, in 1935

Abstract

Fashion can be understood as a privileged space for production of meaning, in which language, culture, and power are articulated. Beyond its aesthetic dimension, it operates as a social discourse capable of translating historically situated values, norms, and behaviours. In this sense, the fashion lexicon does not merely name garments but actively participates in the symbolic construction of the subjects it addresses. For women, fashion plays a central role in constructing and legitimizing models of femininity, functioning as an instrument of social and ideological expression. In the context of Fascist Italy, such processes intensified, as fashion and the discourse about feminine integrated strategies for disseminating moral, behavioural, and political values aligned with the regime. Drawing from this perspective, this paper intends to present analyses of lexical items related to women’s fashion used in the Italian magazine Dea (1935 edition). It seeks to discuss how lexical items referring to women’s clothing act as forms of translation for social and cultural values of the 1930s Italian context, marked by fascist ideology. It further aims to identify noun lexical items of the Italian language regarding women’s fashion present in this magazine, build a lexical corpus from the collected data, and perform lexical and semantic analysis of the selected items, articulating cultural observations when pertinent. The methodology was based on manual data collection, followed by cataloguing and description, with examples from the corpus and support from Italian language dictionaries. The analyses indicate that the fashion lexicon translates conceptions of femininity and behaviour conveyed by the women’s journalism of the period, contributing to studies on the fashion lexicon, the Italian women’s press, and reflections on translation as cultural mediation in the analysed historical period.