This post was originally published in February 2024.

As much as Sanremo is Italy’s most eminent music festival, the event is hardly just a music show: the songs are just one component of a variety-style tv show known for its hosts, performers, comic interludes, and the endless stream of discourse that arises after each night. Needless to say, fashion has become the subject of discussion just as much as the songs. 

In the current era, costumes exist to make a singer’s performance go viral on social media: think of Achille Lauro’s glam-rock unitards in 2020, of Paola and Chiara’s 2022 metal-corset-adorned chainmail-like gowns (from Dolce and Gabbana’s 2007 collection) and of this year’s BigMama, outfitted like a 1920s Cabaret performer, or Mahmood, looking like a futuristic reinterpretation of a Greek statue thanks to Rick Owens’s draped tunic.

When it comes to the female co-hosts, the gowns they wear are just a showcase of a designer’s couture collection, and they tend to safely play with red-carpet-ready tropes (ball gown, mermaid gowns, high slits, lots of chiffon). Singers, however, have to convey creativity, innovation, and, to the extent deemed acceptable by national tv standards, transgression. And while now all of this results into social-media and meme bait, between the 1970s and the1990s, Sanremo’s costume and fashion department had reached a delicate balance between couture and variety-like spectacular fashions. 

For the sake of coherence, we will just discuss the looks of singers who had some affinity with Italian and/or Italo disco, even though they did not necessarily present a disco-infused track at Sanremo.

1970s

Color tv did not arrive in Italy until after 1976, and, as a consequence, clothes were not particularly outré until the late 1970s.

The first appearance of ska and Italo disco diva Donatella Rettore at the Sanremo music festival took place in 1977 with “Oh Carmela.” On that occasion, she wore an outfit that still looks current to this day: a tunic-like shirt and black leggings tucked into cowboy boots, topped with a long, voluminous bob.

When Anna Oxa first debuted on the stage of Sanremo in 1978, her outfit consisted of a menswear-inspired three-piece suit, complete with a waistcoat, and her hair was slicked back. To offset the overall gender-bending component, she sported a heavily editorial, almost Cleopatra-like makeup, complete with maroon eyeshadow and eyeliner. Overall, the styling clearly contrasted with the borderline-operatic nature of her song “Un’emozione da poco.” 

1980s

The 80s were the decade where the balance between couture and costuming reached its peak, where outfits were, in equal measure, creativity, virtuosity, and artifice.

Take the singer Marina Lai. When she presented “Centomila Amori Miei” in 1982, she wore a black fan-pleated jumpsuit by Krizia, with bold shoulders and exaggerated barrel-shaped wide legs. In a way, it’s reminiscent of Kansai Yamamoto’s famous jumpsuit worn by David Bowie.

In 1983,  synth pop group Matia Bazar presented “Vacanze Romane” and on that occasion, front woman Antonella Ruggiero wore a 1940s-inspired two-piece suit and performed in a way that would have been perfectly at home in a David Lynch film. The strength of that performance lay in the juxtaposition of the 1940s vocals and visuals with the synth and electronic-heavy instrumentation. In addition, they performed on an elevated stage platform,  which gave the performance an even more otherworldly feel.

Visually, Patty Pravo dominated the 1984 edition of the festival: she wore a high-priestess-like lurex gown by Versace coupled by a geometric hairstyle with blunt strands of hair that hinted at Japan’s own hime haircut, as seen on Cher in the 1960s.  Her song, “Per una bambola,” has an elegiac tone that reminisces about lost love, lacking bitterness. 

Oxa made her mark again on the fashion front. After shedding her proto-punk, androgynous and provocateur persona, she became the ideal canvas for couture. In 1985,  when singing “A Lei,” she majestically  descended a staircase, Wanda Osiris-style,  and for her first performance, she wore a red cape-like coat that she took off to reveal a matching sleeveless catsuit, notable for its crotch-length frontal zip. For the subsequent performance at the 1985 festival, she also had an alternate jumpsuit in the same style, but with a more intricate, cosmic-like pattern. 

She got flak for it, but she pushed back by remarking “all dancers wear this type of unitard, and it never caused any clamor.” In 1986, upon presenting “E’ tutto un attimo,” she went in yet another direction: this time, Versace created a riff on the little black dress: a midriff-baring criss-cross top coupled with a scifi-like hood, all made in leather. 

Overall, Sanremo 1986 was marked by excellence in costume design.

That same year, Loredana Berté wore leather too and, thanks to the creative zest of Luca Sabatelli, she sported a studded minidress whose focal point was a fake baby bump. This caused controversy too, and, at the time, she declared herself surprised by that reaction. “Had Madonna done it, nobody would have objected,” she said then. Sabatelli and Berté also wanted audiences to stop seeing pregnancy as a debilitating illness but, rather, a state of heightened strength and vitality.

Donatella Rettore went full sci-fi with a draped, stark white gown with a thigh-high slit and maximalist, wing-shaped shoulder pads, a cross between princess Leia and a cosmic Valkyrie. Her alternate outfit looked like a figure-skating costume, complete with an ornamental skirt and mirror-like shards on the bodice area. The song had been originally written by Viola Valentino, and only assigned to Rettore at the last minute. Rettore, on her part, never shied away from talking about how displeased she was with that song, seen as an admission to weakness and meekness, and, for a long time, blamed her decline in popularity on those Sanremo performances.

1990s

By the time the 1990s rolled around, Sanremo’s fashion choices started crystallizing around standard red-carpet fare. As for the last two decades, though, Anna Oxa was the one delivering the most statement-making looks. As she co-hosted the 1994 edition, she wore a Versace gown made of the finest chainmail and what looked like a Longobardian iron crown. The sheath-like gown might have looked simple and sleek at first glance, but the material, the styling, and the color made it one of the most remarkable looks in Sanremo’s history. 

Five years later, in 1999, Oxa presented the anthemic song “Senza Pietà.” In the music video, she played a medieval warrior, brandishing a sword, but when she debuted the song at the Ariston theater, she instead chose a Tom-Ford-era Gucci ensemble consisting of low-slung, rhinestone-studded suede pants, with a thong peeking out, and a simple mock neck sleeveless top. Her hair had a dramatic two-tone styling, with platinum and jet-black strands seamlessly atlernating.  Italian newspapers now maintain that Italian tiktokers copy this look, but it’s unclear whether they’re willingly referencing Oxa or just the y2k style signifiers that outfit embodied.

We continue our exploration of the leading visual-culture players in Italian music. After celebrating the lens of Mauro Balletti and the art direction of Luciano Tallarini, we want to highlight the animation of Guido Manuli, an animator who sits at the intersection of Italian modernism, anime inspiration, adult animation, satire, and a modicum of Disney influence, who created examples of cyberpunk and steampunk universes for artists signed to Baby Records, most notably La Bionda and Rondò Veneziano.

Indeed, Guido Manuli was a pioneer in the early 1980s music video scene, merging “fantasy animation” with the era’s electronic and disco sounds.

On…

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Luciano Tallarini, a frequent artistic partner of photographer Mauro Balletti, has defined the visual language of the Italian recording industry for more than five decades. He achieved a type of aesthetic that combined minimalism with theatricality, where artistic rigor went hand in hand with conceptual subversion.

He was a well-rounded humanist: after obtaining an arts-focused high-school diploma, he started connecting with the cultural and artistic circles of Milan. He worked at a printing press and as a graphic designer for the music-themed magazine “Musica e Dischi,” and he also moonlighted as a journalist. He first made con…

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The case of fine artist and photographer Mauro Balletti is emblematic. His lens captured the likes of Italy’s most prominent music artists, in a series of portraits and full-figure shots that openly reference cinema and art history, in line with his own artistic background. In his recent book I protagonisti della musica italiana, we are offered an overview of his opus.

His is the cover of Loredana Bertè’s 1982 album Traslocando, where she pairs a nun’s habit with glam-rock makeup, complete with a heavy smokey eye and red, lacquered lipstick.

His portraits of Ornella Vanoni, mainly the ones from 1974 shot around the album A un certo punto, convey an aristocratic demeanor, emphasized by the warm color palette he chose and which is reflective of Vanoni’s coloring.

Giuni Russo (read about her in our “Summer Hits” feature), whose featured photo is the cover of the 2021 tribute album Aliena: Giuni dopo Giuni, appears in her cosmic-queen mightiness, with beams shooting from her eyes, in line with the image she cultivated alongside her collaborators Giusto Pio and Franco Battiato.

The photographs of Mia Martini, shot between 1976 and 1981 for her album Mimì, focus on the singer’s eyes: whether they’re downcast, fixed onto the viewer, or captured in a longing stare, they become the focal point of the portraits, which are otherwise intimate and pared down.

Patty Pravo, shot for the 1990 album Pazza idea eccetera eccetera, becomes the embodiment (if not the precursor) of 1990s minimalism: while she had always paraded high-octane costumes that spanned genres such as “Old Norse Priestess” and “Creature from Outer Space,” on this occasion she wears only a V-neck sweater paired with ankle-length pants and a pared-down makeup look, with her platinum hair as the main accessory. Still, her otherworldliness remains, albeit in a more metaphysical sense. “Born a diva, fell on Earth, like David Bowie,” reads Balletti’s liner note.

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In 1979, synth-pop band The Buggles released the decade-defining anthem “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979), which also became the first music video to be aired on the newly minted MTV on the 1st of August 1981.

Italy would not get its own localized version till 1997, but in 1981, music videos in Italy began airing on a TV show called Mister Fantasy, a homage to the 1967 track “Dear Mr. Fantasy” (1967).

Recalling the setup of the video for “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Mister Fantasy was filmed in an all-white studio space, with screens showcasing music videos. The host, Carlo Massarini, wore white as well. Many of the early music videos (known, in Italy, as “videoclip”) were actually productions of Mister Fantasy, a program that not only amplified music videos but produced original content directly.

We found some examples of early music videos from the Italian music scene. Not all of them qualify as Italo disco, but they remain, nonetheless, capsules of 1980s visual culture in Italy, straddling between futurism and nostalgia.

La Bionda: I Wanna Be Your Lover (1980)

The premise is simple: “Two men in spacesuits went into outer space for a journey of their lifetime.” Directed by Guido Manuli, the music video has the feel of Leiji Matsumoto’s Galaxy Express 999 and anticipates space-themed epics such as Tron and even more auteur-like productions such as Magnetic Rose. Manuli also created the animations and animated sequences for the classical-crossover albums La Serenissima, Odissea Veneziana, and Casanova by Rondò Veneziano.

zPino D’Angiò: Una Notte Maledetta (1980)

In “Una Notte Maledetta,” Pino D’Angiò plays the role of the typical hard-boiled film noir protagonist while bemoaning his own loneliness, losses, and solitude. On video, this translates to gritty cityscapes, night lights, and dramatic lighting with a predilection for purples and teals. Direction was by Giandomenico Curi, a multi-hyphenate who extensively writes about pop music, cinema, and pop culture. As a director, he was one of the most trusted collaborators of the Mister Fantasy music-video enterprise. In 2005, he penned a biography of Italian-born French singer Dalida, titled Dalida: la voce e l’anima.

Donatella Rettore: Clamoroso (1981)

“Clamoroso” started off as the B-side of “Donatella” (1981), but its music video stands out for its narrative direction. Its frame story, where Rettore displays a look that is very reminiscent of Britney Spears in “...Baby One More Time” (1998), relays that Donatella (or a doppelgänger) has left the insane asylum, and we then follow her as she parades around city streets in a bridal getup, towering over her husband, whom she ends up murdering. The non-narrative segments have her dancing in an autobody shop, clad in silver and red.

Ivan Cattaneo: Il Geghegè (1981)

Nostalgia is not just the purview of Millennials and GenZ-ers. In the early 1980s, Ivan Cattaneo shifted from glam-rock to 1960s revivalism, and his appearances on Mister Fantasy solidified this new phase with the album 2060 Italian Graffiati with songs like "Nessuno mi può giudicare" and "Una zebra a pois". The music video of the cover of “Geghegè/Una zebra a pois” stands out for its zeitgeisty elements: a Saturday-Night-Fever-like dancefloor, a deep-space-like background, and Cattaneo himself channelling, with his moves, a combination of John Travolta and the Emcee in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret.

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Yet, what really made the short-lived, yet genre defining (and defying) variety show Stryx as memorable as it was, ultimately, the work of costume designer Gianna Sgarbossa. Stryx remains a cult program thanks to the fashion-oriented advancement in the costume department, as Sgarbossa uniquely combined highbrow and lowbrow culture alongside a healthy dose of self-mockery. After graduating from the set-design program at Brera’s Art Academy, she worked for Giorgio Strehler’s production, RAI, and the movie industry. 

disco_bambino

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Under Sgarbossa’s direction, fabrics were painted on, frayed, layered, and deconstructed. “Once, we went all the way to Turin to get enough latex for us to submerge a linen dress that we would then mould as if it were made of clay,” Diego Dalla Palma, who th…

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In second grade, I had two daily habits right after I came out of school. The first was to stop by the window of the local record shop called “L’Angolo Della Musica” to check the latest releases on display. The second was to rush home to catch the last part of “Pronto, Raffaella?”, the daily hybrid of game show, talk show and variety hosted by Raffaella Carrà. As I was sitting two feet away from the TV screen (which was something my mom always reproached me for), along came Raffaella and a group of male dancers singing “Caliente Caliente” in black leather and bondage outfit that were a clear reference to the gay leather/Tom Of Finland style universe. My mom behind me was also fascinated by the performance and was hypnotized by such a contrast of “dark” costumes and the joyful tune Raffaella was singing. It was the beginning of my fascination with the aesthetics/music combo that just in those years was making history in Italian culture. 

Disco Bambino

When people picture Raffaella Carrà in their mind’s eye, the first bars of a song usually go alongside a golden bob and a series of flashy, yet elegant jumpsuits, and gowns, encrusted in rhinestones or embellished with feathers. Her stage persona was never limited to her music: a consummate dancer with a full grasp on the importance of visual culture, she fashioned herself as a total work of art. Read our analysis of Raffaella Carrà's music in case you missed it.

Costumes are crucial in the definition of an image of a performer or a character, and this is especially true among Italian singers, performers and divas, as they harnessed TV as a way to reach the widest audience possible. Costumes made for variety shows–so where a performer is “playing themselves” and not a character in a fictional context–have to make the performer or the diva instantly recognizable: after more than 50 years, Carrà’s statement jumpsuits and her bobs are seared in the collective imagery as much as, say, Cinderella’s ball gown, Dorothy’s pinafore, and Lady Gaga’s earlier, more daring looks. 

In the case of Raffaella Carrà, Raffaella herself saw her as another version of herself, referring to it as “the Carrà character.” Her everyday self, Raffaella Pelloni, was a quiet, introverted, and private person. With that being said, Carrà’s performances, in particular, heavily relied on choreographies where she was surrounded by a host of muscular male dancers: the presence of sequins, rhinestones, and voluminous sleeves (or pants) would heighten the choreographic component of her performance within variety shows. Similarly, when a costume designer chose to emphasize her legs with semi-sheer tights or spandex leggings, her agility and flexibility would take the spotlight. 

On that note, Carrà often spoke about how she would feel fully at ease in full high-camp regalia but would feel self conscious if she were made to wear a traditional two-piece suit. “Luca, if you give me a pair of golden tights, I can leave my house,” she told costume designer and long-time creative collaborator  Luca Sabatelli. “But if you make me wear something that’s heavy on tailoring, I will look like a secretary.”

Ever since RAI’s inception, TV and fashion had been inextricably linked: coverage of fashion shows started as early as 1959, and some of the most reputable ateliers, such as Sorelle Fontana, would use the Sanremo music festival to showcase their latest creations on female performers. On January 9, 1959, the tv special titled “La moda dell’estate” showcased the latest fashions alongside music entertainment. The director was none other than Enzo Trapani, who would then become one of the most eminent visionaries in variety television. This relationship between national tv, fashion and stagecraft sets Italy apart from its neighboring countries, and the costuming of Italian disco divas is a testimony to that. 

The Midriff That Started It All: Enrico Rufini’s Costumes

Early in her career, when she co-hosted the variety show Canzonissima in 1970, Raffaella Carrà made fashion and costume-design history by appearing on national tv with a bare midriff.  The outfit in question was a white, two-piece set consisting of flared pants, and a mock-neck crop top with sheer, tulle sleeves with satin ribbons tied along her arms. There is also a black version of this outfit, which replaces the pants with a miniskirt and has the ribbons also connecting said skirt with the matching crop top. 

These two outfits were trailblazers: Cher would only follow suit in 1971 in Sonny and Cher’s Comedy Hour, while encountering pushback from tv execs, and then on The Cher Show.

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