Jenny Hartley
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Clothes and uniform in the theatre of fascism
Clemence Dane and Virginia Woolf
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By the late 1930s Clemence Dane and Virginia Woolf were both well-established women writers, and well known as feminists. While Woolf's logic works with the connections between clothes and ideology, Dane links clothes to performance and theatre clothes and uniform, the stock-in-trade of performance, are central to the theatre of fascism. Dane's insight into the dressing rooms of 1930s' fascism is confirmed by subsequent historians. It was no accident that the birthplace of twentieth-century fascism was in the land of opera. Fascist black made its first appearance on the glamorous backs of the Arditi, a volunteer force of elite shock troops in the Italian Army during the Great War. The starring role in the theatre of fascism is played by the dictator himself. Dane's prescient appreciation of the theatre of fascism may have been assisted by the interpénétration of theatre and reality in her own life.

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