The Unadorned Citizen: Jewelry and it’s Absence in the Fascist Ventennio
Newberg, Casey
Newberg, Casey
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Abstract
While Italian Fascist material culture, gender politics, and colonial representations have been largely represented in contemporary scholarship, the material turn has not produced a comparable framework for the examination of jewelry. Existing studies on jewelry and bodily forms of ornamentation rely predominantly on survey-based approaches that have long privileged elite collections, stylistic progression, and material value, neglecting the social and political significance of everyday adornment. As it stands, our current understanding of jewelry is largely bound by typological identifications that confine it to stylistic periods, positioning it alongside—rather than within—historical processes. Long considered as the neutral counterpart to fashion and largely denied analytical autonomy, this study instead examines jewelry within the ventennio (through both its presence and absence), arguing that it operated not as a passive byproduct, but as an active agent in the production of social order, gendered discipline, and racial hierarchy under Mussolini’s regime. Using a corpus that culminates, but is not confined to, the 1935 oro alla Patria and Giornata della Fede campaigns, this study examines how the regime extracted private valuables to finance colonial war, while recoding the absence of jewelry as a performative index of modernity, austerity, and national identity. Through an examination of visual culture and print media, specifically Lidel and La difesa della Razza, this thesis reveals how the regime weaponized anti-adornment rhetoric, positioning the unadorned Italian woman against the ornamented colonial subject to construct a moral and evolutionary index that underwrote both imperial expansion and modern conceptions of italianità.
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Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2026.
Date
2026
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Keywords
Jewelry, Fascism
Citation
Newberg, Casey. "The Unadorned Citizen: Jewelry and it’s Absence in the Fascist Ventennio".