Rachael Martin - The Fashion Lovers Guide to Milan (City Guides)

Dedication

To my mother, who loved the clothes and the cappuccinos, and would have loved this book.

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

PEN & SWORD WHITE OWL

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Rachael Martin, 2021

ISBN 9781526733733

ePUB ISBN 9781526733740

Mobi ISBN 9781526733757

The right of Rachael Martin to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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FOREWORD

I FIRST CAME TO MILAN after I arrived in Italy at the end of the 1990s, with the soundtrack to the Merchant Ivory production of A Room with View still playing in my head and visions of that oh-so-seductive dolce vita. I spent my time getting on and off trains, eating pasta and pizza in every form I could find, and spending all my English language teachers wages on clothes. I remember buying a pair of cream D&G jeans that first hot summer, and if youve ever been in Milan in summer, youll understand how hot it can get. Not that I cared. I was in the city of the beautiful people buying a pair of cream D&G jeans, and I loved it all. I sat in cafs, cultivating a life-long appreciation of cappuccino and brioche. I studied the Italian girls and wondered how they managed to look just how they did. There was this Italian way of life that I could see playing out in front of my eyes, and I wanted a part of it. In the meantime, I was learning Italian. I was learning that language was a passport to culture, and that the only way I could really ever understand a culture was through its language.

Writing A Fashion Lover's Guide to Milan gave me the opportunity to write not only about the fashion, but also about a city through the lens of its fashion, a city Id grown to love. Milan is one of the worlds four fashion capitals. Its the Italian city that sent Italian fashion onto an international stage during the 1970s and 1980s. Just as Milan made Italian fashion so famous and desirable, fashion has helped to make Milan the city we see today. If I were to do this story any justice, I would have to include the bigger picture, to place fashion firmly within the city itself, and touch upon how Milan as a fashion city was created. If Milan is one of the worlds fashion capitals today, it is because of all that went before. I also wanted to fill the guide with some of the places and people that have inhabited, and still do inhabit this world, and tell some of their stories, however briefly. These are the stories that fascinated me, and continue to fascinate me. There are many Milanese fashion figures that are internationally famous, and then there are others, whose stories are not always so well known, and often women. They may be women you haven't heard of, or only heard of vaguely, but they are women whose stories equally deserve to be told.