Il sogno di Fellini vestito - Fellini's Dream Dress

The sack dress. Fellini’s muse behind La Dolce Vita. Who would have thought that fashion can inspire a director, and be the basis of a film. The image of Anita Ekberg emerging from Trevi fountain in a sack dress is one of the most iconic scenes in film history. Cristobal Balenciaga, the designer behind the sack dress, favored fluid lines that “allowed him to alter the way clothing related to a woman’s body.” Balenciaga contributed to the world of la moda (fashion) a “new silhouette for women.” Now woman of any shape and size can “show-off” their natural curves and look beautiful.

However, it is more than just a beautiful dress, it also conveys a meaning. One of the reasons for Fellini was a “poke at the Catholic Church and a wink at the fashion industry” (Variety.com). According to Jay Weissberg, a film critic based in Rome, Italy, he says that the dress is “[the] transparent mesh at the décolletage and the back makes it incredibly sexy and restrained…Roman women tend to love clothes that create an impression of strength as well as femininity” (Variety.com). The sack dress in La Dolce Vita sets “a new aesthetic standard and a statement of liberation from a repressive political regime and a dying culture” (Pasolini). Brunello Rondi, Fellini's co-screenwriter, explains that "the fashion of women's sack dresses which possessed that sense of luxurious butterflying out around a body that might be physically beautiful but not morally so; these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside" (Wikipedia).

Marcello moves in a world of conspicuous semi-celebrities and their “hangers-on”, drifting cheerfully through the high class society and becoming the norm. The emerging post-war “sweet life” in which Rome is depicted as a moral wasteland is filled with a directionless self-indulgence. The iconic scene of Anita Ekberg wading in the Trevi Fountain, acts as a counterpoint to the empty lives of the characters in later scenes. They all drift into emotional and moral listlessness. Hence this film is referred to as a neo-realistic film. Italian director, Pasolini, explains La Dolce Vita as an “exhibition of the Italian pretty bourgeoisie in its own ambience with exaggerated its traits and which burns it in a revealing and gloomy light” (Pasolini).  This sack dress embodies this ideology: external and exaggerated beauty, however internal ugliness. All the characters are all cynics, egotistical, spoiled, silly, frightened, miserable, etc. However, no one sees that…all they see is beauty and glamour. A beautiful dress.