Lifestyle
The panozzo lifestyle was, without a doubt, made up of cornerstones that - like other youth scenes - focused on sociality and aggregation. Squares, porticoes, bars, fast food restaurants, and nightclubs traced the geography of new hedonistic youth, Italian in identity as much as American in ambition and lifestyle. In their lifestyle as in their wardrobe, the paninari made almost inexplicable crossings of styles and influences. In their walkman, they alternated the new wave of Duran Duran and A-ha with Italo by Righeira or Ryan Paris, the New Romantic pop of Culture Club with the melodies of Gazebo, on their menu burgers and fries but in their routine lamps and wellness.
All this while maintaining a constant veil of pop appeal that distinguished the entire attitude of the movement. The sumptuous Jeeps for trips to the mountain resorts were replaced by German Zündapp motorcycles for the city centers - unique in the history of the youth scene - or Laverda motorcycles often modified with Zündapp engines. Invited by all other subcultures of the time, the paninari embodied the capitalist society against which to hurl themselves with rage in those jungles of militant youthful nonconformity that were the streets and arcades of Italy until the dawn of the new millennium.
The roots of the Pet Shop Boys' 1986 catchphrase Paninaro can be found right there. During a visit to Milan by the English duo to promote their album West End Girls, Neil Tennant was apostrophized - legend has it - for his colorful outfit. The singer became curious, he stopped some paninari in the street to ask for clarification, discovering a scene that, according to him, he should not have liked because it was close to a pop sensibility that did not belong to him, but that actually seduced him for its new and disruptive aesthetics. Tennant and Lowe, hence, seduced by the paninari, by the Italo Disco of Baltimore, and by the culture of the Belpaese even returned to Milan to film the single’s video, surrounded by actual members of the scene.
1. LEGACY & HERITAGE
In an urban sea of youth scenes that were influenced and permeated by their foreign counterparts, the paninari were able to represent an all-Italian unicum that, in turn, was able to export - in unsuspected times - the Italian spirit around the world. In the bourgeois identity of the paninari, as well as in their refusal to perceive themselves as an underground subculture, lies the ability to deeply influence and mark the pop culture of the 80s. Forty years on from their first appearance paninari still stand as something truly unique. Surrounded by subcultures - from mods to goths - that borrowed their aesthetic, philosophical and musical inspirations from America and the United Kingdom, paninari were in fact the only genuinely and entirely Italian scene to impact foreign youth culture.
Thus, we find Lucio Dalla - bound by a friendship with Massimo Osti - a witness for C.P. Company, the Italo Disco idol Dan Harrow in a total paninaro look, or an unsuspected Paolo Maldini in a Best Company sweatshirt and Vans sneakers. The cult of the paninaro figure reached, even, the television, obviously on Mediaset networks. The Gran Gallo interpreted by Enrico Braschi on the cult program Drive In was a macchiatric hyperbole that captures how, in just a few years, the "paninaresimo" had already become an instant classic, a pop myth that needed to be ridden and plucked.
These are all examples that highlight the dual nature of paninari: on the one hand, an originally elitist and geolocalized scene, and on the other, a pervasive customary phenomenon of the dominant culture. A pattern that we only found in the history of the Italian youth culture otherwise only with the Beatlemania boom of the Sixties and with the trap of the last five years.
We might even go so far as to argue that their disillusionment and detachment from politics make them surprisingly contemporary, especially when we compare them to the emphasis placed on fashion by today's youth clusters: from drop culture loyalists to TikTokers who approach the aesthetics of subcultures without any militant spirit. However, one of the most important legacies left by the paninari is to have, even if unconsciously, created a fil rouge with the English Casual subculture of the 80s, nowadays one of the main responsible for the renewed attention on the panozza aesthetic in the world.
The Nerazzurri ultras who frequented Piazza Liberty and San Babila, were not the only ones to grasp the appeal of sportswear and casual Italian wear of the 80s. Similarly, young British supporters saw their teams’ European cup games as an opportunity to raid the continent’s finest sports garments from the likes of Lacoste, Fila, Tacchini, or C.P. Company e Stone Island, which were then adapted to terrace culture. Although the Casuals were more explicitly sporty in their outfits, in these long-distance flirtations with the paninari, which were more aesthetic than ideological, came the fascination with the figure of Massimo Osti and argyle patterns, which from Burlington socks moved on to Pringle or Lyle&Scott sweaters.
It will then be the Pet Shop Boys and their Paninaro to export the phenomenon beyond the UK, definitively sanctioning the adoration of the Casuals, and not only, for the paninaro iconography. In 1987, in fact, the English edition i-D dedicated an editorial on the new urban tribes of London two pages to the British Paninari, a meteor of the English subcultural universe. In the same report, we also find the Brash Pack, a hybrid of styles in which typical elements of the Pet Shop Boys coexist, such as the sailor hat, and the paninari style, jeans with patches, belts with massive buckles, campus jackets, designer clothes and shoes like the Clarks Wallabee.
A fascination that today is reflected in continuous crossovers between the world of British football fandom and the heritage of the paninari, but which also continues in high fashion, with the use that in the last five years the trap and hip hop scene has made of down jackets, from the North Face ones (also in collaboration with Gucci) to the one designed by Kanye West for Yeezy x Gap. And again, the relaunch of Moncler also passed for the orange down jacket worn by Drake in the video for Hotline Bling, which in turn has become a cornerstone of memetic iconography. Not to mention the renewed cross-generational popularity of brands like Stone Island and C.P. Company.
THE FASCINATION FOR THE FIGURE OF MASSIMO OSTI AND FOR ARGYLE PATTERNS WAS BORN.
2. CINEMA
As for all the teenagers of the 80s, cinema played an important role for the paninari too. It wasn’t just a form of popular entertainment but above all an inspirational tool to capture new trends. Like fashion, 'paninaro' cinema can, in fact, be divided into several branches. On the one hand, there are those films like Tony Scott's Top Gun (1986) which, while having nothing to do with the boys in Moncler and Timberland, were adopted in virtue of anesthetic and values, perceived as close to those of the paninari. It was airplane pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchel played by Tom Cruise who launched the fashion of the Schott jacket covered in Avirex patches and Ray-Ban Aviators.
In the same year, I'm going to marry Simon Le Bon is, instead, another iconic film of the scene (and for the lovers of B movies). Carlo Scotti's film, based on the novel with the same name by Clizia Gurrado, represents the other side of the coin with respect to Top Gun, that is, a work conceived to cash in on the fashion of paninari. It is a genre film that updates the music videos of the 1960s, recounting the immoderate - and almost macchiatric - passion for Duran Duran that young people had at the time.
To capture the zeitgeist of the scene in the most effective way are, in fact, films that are not explicitly paninari, from cinepanettoni to other classics of Italian comedy such as Yuppies - I Giovani di Successo (1986) or Italian Fast Food that launches on the big screen the figure of the Gran Gallo played in Drive In by Enrico Braschi. In their ruthless observation of the mores and vices of Italian society, the Vanzinas could not fail to include in their films many aesthetic and linguistic references that both the paninari and the yuppies had introduced into the pop culture of the time.
From the soundtrack of Vacanze di Natale (1983) - which echoed the cult compilation series Mixage which takes up those of the compilation Mixage Baby Records token among the paninari - the Jeep off-road, another status symbol of the Gauls, passing inevitably for the clothing. It's interesting to note the transition of the paninari fashion in the space of seven years, from the garish down jackets, historic Christmas Vacation to the rockabilly drift of the end-of-the-decade pan look in Vacanze di Natele '90, as seen in Christian De Sica's style of black leather jacket, pastel purple polo neck, and '50s revival topknot.
