Masculinities on the Dancefloor. The Evolution of the Italian Male Identity Through Dance and Fashion at Rimini Paradiso Club

Nicola Brajato’s essay focuses on the history of the Rimini Paradiso club which animated the Italian Riviera’s nightlife in the last decades of the 20th century. It is a project born of an analysis of a novel archive created by Gianni Fabbri during his career which is studied here for the first time. In addition to retracing Paradiso’s history, the purpose of this essay is to follow evolutions in Italian masculinity via fashion, demonstrating that nightclubs became an unusual space cut off from the standards of everyday life, in which male aesthetics extended outwards via auto-determination and experimentation.