| Summary: | This essay aims to investigate a particular icon of contemporary imagery, the so-called lolita, in the interweaving of literature, fashion, art and cinema. The character of the precociously sensual adolescent represents a sort of childhood variation on the theme of the femme fatale that emerges in the European novel between the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, from Annie Vivanti to Gabrielle Colette, from Mura to Nabokov, who consacreted this kind of innocent and transgressive femininity, sublimating it through stylistic elegance. The still little studied figure of the seducing girl or “nymphet” is analyzed here through the motifs of body and clothes, in order to reveal the masks of a controversial femininity, in many ways paradigmatic of the contradiction of modernity.
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