Italian Fashion and Hollywood: Iconic Designers, Stars of the Digital Stage, Museums to the Silver Screen, and Streaming

We begin in the 1960s with a defining moment for Italian film and fashion as art, where Italy meets New York and Hollywood in the film, La Dolce Vita (see Fig. 1), directed by Federico Fellini and considered one of the greatest films of all time. Produced by Astor Pictures of New York and filmed on location in Rome and at Cinecittà Studios. It is especially memorable for its passionate scenes with film stars Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Eckberg at the Trevi Fountain, dressed in stunning black and white costumes by Danilo Donati, who was awarded an Oscar for best costume design, while the film’s composer Nino Rota (1911–1979) wrote the film score, and later won an Oscar for the score of Godfather Part II, 1974. La Dolce Vita became a lynchpin of a new cinematic art defining the angst and free spirit of the 1960s, that captured the imagination of a rising mass audience of a new popular culture movement enabled by the international distribution of films on the silver screen in theatres and television that broke the code of the old sociopolitical status of the arts as elitist.