This article addresses the role paid by buttonhole flowers in the men’s attire in 1910-1930s Italy. It investigates how flowers have been worn and how they negotiated gender roles in a perspective that combines eco-criticism, history of art, history of fashion and queer theory. The different range of cultural meanings that the boutonnière embodied is explored through the emblematic figure of Italian aesthete, writer, and painter Filippo de Pisis (1896- 1956) and his considerations on the art of wearing flowers. This article investigates de Pisis’ aesthetic and political interests regarding flowers, in the cultural climate of a period in which fascism rose to power in Italy. Flowers, fashion, and elegance provided a destabilising response to the fascist aestheticisation of politics, as de Pisis helps to highlight.
