Subcultures, movements, and hidden realities. nss magazine and Italy Segreta have created The Italian Archive Stories project, aiming to recount phenomena that are often ignored but are part of the cultural history of our country, exploring spaces and places, testimonies and memories of a bygone Italy but not to be forgotten.
In the first chapter, edited by Ragazzi di Strada, the history of Paninari, pivotal phenomenon of the 80s born in Milan, Italy, arrived throughout the country thanks to its clear-cut aesthetic, mirror of the Italian society of the time.
Milan, the dawn of the short decade. The Lead Years are at their pyrotechnic tail twists. There is political militancy, but there is also music, fashion, and accessories. All Italian squares and their stadiums become theaters where to mix styles to experiment with new fashions and, above all, were to be different in the name of urban tribalism.
It is in one of these, Piazza Liberty - as legend has it - a group of friends, including Nerazzurri ultras, skinheads, and other guys with sympathies for the extra-parliamentary right, gave life to a so-far unseen style. The green, blue, or black bomber jacket borrowed from paramilitary clothing is worn folded up, with a visible orange quilted lining. On the other hand, on their feet, Timberlands dangle from the balcony of San Siro, sweeping away in one go all the footwear that had defined the generation of student protests. Their meeting spot is a panineria, the bar Al Panino. For some they are the younger brothers of the Sanbabilini, for many, they are the (more or less unconscious) founding fathers of the paninaro movement.
Italian Unicum, the Paninari has been one of the youth clusters that has been able to influence the costume even outside our borders. Their rapid transition from a highly geo-localized scene to a national phenomenon that embodied the aesthetics and thinking of 1980s consumer culture has long contributed to their stigmatization by followers of other subcultures of the time. This has always made an in-depth, objective, and accessible account of the phenomenon, capable of going beyond the mere nostalgia of dedicated social pages.
A subculture or simply a trend? Maybe both, maybe none of that.
In order to truly understand the phenomenon of the paninari, we took a trip back in time, returning to Milan in the 1980s through a digital archive made up of unpublished material and testimonies of one of the most important youth scenes in the Italian history.
