The 3rd Fashion in Film Festival opens next week in London (more about it in the next few days), so, to celebrate it, I will try to mainly focus on film and fashion in the next posts.
Since I will be introducing one of the films in the programme, Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica (Satanic Rhapsody) next week at the Barbican, I would like to focus today on the main actress featured in this film, Lyda Borelli, because she had some wonderful connections with fashion and style.
Borelli was born in La Spezia on 22nd March 1887 from Napoleone Borelli and Cesira Banti. Both her parents were theatre actors and it was only natural for Lyda to follow her parents’ steps.
She debuted in a theatre play in 1902: at the time Lyda looked like an ethereal Pre-Raphaelite women and, in later years, she incarnated Gabriele D’Annunzio’s ideal of feminine beauty.
At 18 she already played in main roles and soon became one of D’Annunzio’s favourite actresses. She starred in 1904 in D’Annunzio’s La Figlia di Jorio (The Daughter of Jorio) and the decadent poet and writer dedicated her Il ferro and Più che l’amore.
In 1908 Borelli had already turned into an icon of style: many elegant women started imitating the way she dressed, moved and even suffered on stage. In 1913 she starred together with Mario Bonnard in her first film, Ma l’amor mio non muore (Everlasting Love) by Mario Caserini, one of the most famous Italian directors of silent films. The movie was very successful and consolidated her fame.
Between 1914 and 1918 she shot 14 films and 2 documentaries; at the climax of her career she married count Vittorio Cini, a powerful man and entrepreneur, and retired, devoting her life to her family (she had four children, Giorgio, Mynna, Yana and Ylda) living between Venice and Rome, where she died in 1959.
The legend says that when the curtain fell at the end of her last play, people in the audience started crying and throwing her flowers: it was almost unbelievable for them to think that Lyda Borelli had just acted for the last time and some critics wrote that was a national day of mourning.
Borelli combined the decadence of D’Annunzio’s heroines, French elegance and Italian beauty and her acting was mainly based on excessive gestures, painful expressions and languid gazes.
She was essentially a dark femme fatale representing desire and sensuality. She often interpreted characters defeated by diabolical destinies who ended up killing themselves (often with poison – she died in 8 out of 14 films…).
Some critics stated she had very limited acting skills and her talent stood in a very special power she had of turning through her gestures and movements unachievable, unattainable desires, dreams and illusions into a sort of tangible reality. Antonio Gramsci, who in 1917 worked as a theatre reviewer, criticised her stating she represented a heightened form of sensuality, “a part of a primordial and prehistoric humanity” that had managed to cast a spell on the audience.
From a fashion and style point of view Borelli was very important for two main reasons: she had a favourite fashion designer, artist Mariano Fortuny (admired also by Eleonora Duse) and deemed his creations as vital in her films, and she started a peculiar phenomenon defined by the term “borellismo” and the verb “borelleggiare”, that, included even in encyclopaedias and dictionaries of the Italian language, mainly referred to women, meant to pose, dress and move like Lyda Borelli.
Novelist Lucio D'Ambra wrote about her in 1937: “The new goddess eclipsed with her aesthetic prestige all the others; young Italian women literally moulded themselves on this sinuous statue that, struck by love pangs, harmoniously twisted and turned like a sensual music. Women at the time loved her grand gestures on stage and on the big screen and tried to imitate as much as they could those plastic yet sensual movements. What later on happened with Greta Garbo, had happened in Italy with Lyda Borelli a few years earlier. It was easy to meet in the literary salons and cafes, at the theatre and in the streets many little Borellis who starved themselves ending up looking like sinuously serpentine shadows, thin, wrapped up and draped in the shortest fabric swatches they could find among the stocks of the silk shops.”
The "borellismo" trend only lasted a few years, disappearing soon after the actress retired. Today’s vapid celebrities and supposed instant icons of fashion and style dictating us how to dress and what to look like, should maybe ponder a bit about Borelli's life.
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