Bodies rule! The embodiment of power between fashion and politics

This article focuses on the construction of power via the body in the context of the Italian political scene of the last two decades. From a semiotic and fashion-theory perspective,the article interprets local peculiarities through the lens of more general issues concerning the way pop, mass and media culture have been transforming our relation to power, as well as to the high symbolic body of ‘the chief’. Clothing signs, fashion mechanisms and figures connected to fashion imagery have played an important role in redefining power as a gendered, bodily and visual discourse, which is not only carried on by media, but, above all, created in mediated contexts