Factious elegance. Pasolini and Male Fashion

For Pier Paolo Pasolini, rather than an adjective 'factious' is a sort of blank cheque to be cashed in from time to time. Factious are the happy grins on the faces of his ragazzi, which, with the years of caked-in dirt, overlay the raunchy with the banal; factious is their passive imbibing of the new, capitalism-imposed lifestyles, like the self-satisfaction of the sleek bourgeoisie. 'Factious', above all, are the 'degenerate' and invariably red scarves knotted round the necks of the boys-practically children-on their tireless, existential quest between Trastevere and the notorious shanty-towns of fifties Rome. Through the following decades, and particularly in Petrolio, the working-class dandyism of 'Yankee Rome' was to remain the source of the vitality of Pasolini's writing: an energy as desperate as it was tragic. As in his films, although via an independent route, items of clothing-place of honor going, ça va sans dire, to the ubiquitous blue jeans, or 'American pants'--serve to mould and fashion the bodies of his ragazzi di vita, and are refashioned in their turn. Clothes both impose convention, and have convention thrust upon them. Interlocutor in this sartorial dialogue is the teddy boy, product of bourgeois Europe's time-honored industrialization.