Giulia Rossi, a professional journalist from Bologna, lives in Rome and specializes in the fields of semiotics and fashion communication. She divides her time between teaching and freelancing, collaborating on a regular basis with John Cabot University, the American Institute for Foreign Study, the European Institute of Design, and Rome Business School.

She is the author of publications for Italian and international scientific journals. For Pendragon, she has already published two gastronomic guides in tandem with Fabio Bottonelli, Mangiamo a Bologna (2010) and Mangiare fuori a Bologna (2012), the vademecum Ricette per la vita in società (2013), and the academic text Fashion blogger, new dandy? (2015), in the wake of which M come moda was born in 2023.

This book illustrates the fashion universe from A to Z, illustrated through the films, songs, or images that have turned an item of clothing or a style into a symbol. From Marilyn Monroe and her legendary nude dress in which she seductively sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ to Euphoria, with its glitter and the new trends emerging with Gen Z. In 132 entries, full of references that stimulate the curiosity and creativity of those who read and interpret them, Giulia Rossi transforms mass culture into a passe-partout that manages to open the doors of the fashion system to everyone.

The book is making headlines not only for its content but also for the initiatives that have followed, such as conferences, presentations, and the theatrical debut in London. The semiotic dictionary, for the uninitiated, does not simply provide definitions. Following the example of Umberto Eco's open work, the book builds a bridge between fashion and other cultural dimensions such as art, music, film, and literature.

I would start by asking you about your personal relationship with fashion. What are the challenges of staying up-to-date with an ever-changing universe?

I have always been a curious person, stimulated by many artistic and creative expressions, in particular theatre, literature, and cinema. Fashion, from a certain point in my personal and working life, has become the language through which I read and interpret reality. Being a journalist and a semiologist, fashion for me is a universe of symbols with which to communicate; just like words, it is one more tool to be treated with extreme respect and not superficially. Dealing with fashion means dealing with ourselves.

How did you choose the headwords to include and contextualize them, making interdisciplinary comparisons?

I started from words and references that came naturally to me, that were part of my personal archive, and then went on to expand on words related to current themes and styles or that linked to iconic images of our contemporaneity. The challenge is always to identify, in what appears or is presented as new, the roots in the past, the ancestors we might say, and also to check whether the meaning of an object, color, or any element linked to clothing has changed in meaning over time and space. Almost always, every case, every text must be analyzed in its context; this remains a fundamental truth that one cannot or should not disregard, a method of working and living.

For some time, you have been presenting your work in Italy and abroad. How do the different cultures you encounter perceive fashion?

Abroad, or among the many foreign students, mostly American, that I meet every day for my university courses, there is a lot of interest in Italian culture and the study of it, while abroad, there is often less attention to aesthetics and dress. When you say that Italians abroad recognize themselves by the way they are dressed, you are emphasizing this care, which is part of our history, of our past, but which always becomes current and projects us into the future.

As a scholar of d'Annunzio, I cannot overlook the moments when he is mentioned in the text. So I ask you, what do you think his influence was on the style of the time and whether his importance is still relevant from this point of view?

D'Annunzio was a great aesthete, lover of beauty, collector, and perhaps among the last true dandies in history. A figure of reference for those who love details and construct complex images and imagery made up of multiple references and non-obvious juxtapositions. A love for the in-depth, for the non-obvious, for that which is not always immediately easy but which requires time and care to be discovered: these are all aspects that the study of this man of letters can foster.

May I ask you if you are working on future projects?

For the academy, as well as for my clients' communication consultancy, I try to open up and implement the connections and suggestions that are part of my imagination. There is a new book in the pipeline, but we are keeping it confidential at the moment.

Capri pants: minimal and refined, this is how the style of the Capri pants wearer is defined, usually paired with understated t-shirts of the marinieĚre type with classic Parisian-style blue and white horizontal stripes and low ballerina-type shoes.

The pants are tight around the leg, suitable for petite physiques and slender legs. Capri pants triumphed starting in the 1950s and 1960s, first in the home as the garment of American housewives. In those days on the screen, women are still depicted in heels and sugary floral dresses, like those worn in Wayne Thiebaud’s Eating Figures—an American painter famous for his cakes, ice creams, and lipsticks to whom the Beyeler Foundation in Basel recently dedicated an exhibition a few years after his death in 2021 at age 101—and then also on the big screen and in fashion magazines. Prussian Sonja de Lennart invented Capri pants in 1948, but made them iconic for the small screen. Mary Tyler Moore, who plays Laura, the protagonist’s wife, for “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

For the big screen, it was Audrey Hepburn’s Roman Holiday (1953) that made the Capri style signed by the Fontana sisters triumph, while the following year, Hubert de Givenchy replicated it with Billy Wilder’s Sabrina. From being a garment for housewives and naive young women like Sandra Dee in Scandal in the Sun (1959), these versatile pants also became an existentialist uniform associated with strictly black turtleneck sweaters, as taught by Juliette Gréco. Capri pants never go out of fashion, but they can be said to become a transversal must-have over time, with a double soul of good girl and bad girl, like Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman, unleashed on the dance floor with John Travolta for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). Endless legs, a white shirt, and Capri pants.