'Che credeva, che fossi Cenerentola!': Changes of clothes, guest appearances, and other diva performances in 1950s cinema

Italian female stars of the 1950s are often subject to the gaze of male characters as they dress or undress. In this article, I analyse this cliché and others, such as dances, partial stripteases, and guest appearances, as textual topoi, in order to define how visual attractions attained a narrative function consistent with the fragmentary character of that cinema. The frequent visual linking of feminine beauty and consumer goods also helps to re-frame, historiographically, the issue of stardom in the early 1950s, and to identify that period as a complex one in which the female body was no longer visualized as an element able to link the cinematic representation to a supposed state of nature, but not yet displayed as a completely commodified object.