The fantastic creative energy of the 1960s took off with a burst of black and white: La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini. An instant cult film, it became a great classic of modernity and continues to affect generation after generation, legendary yet always contemporary. A baroque frieze of a high-strung Rome, where decadence and despair, missteps and glamour, sophistication and the search for absolutes, are painted with powerful images imbued with a memorable, unique and prophetic beauty.

Dolce Vita Style draws on the history of those that inspired the film in the theatrically Rome of the ’50s and sums up the innumerable influences that this cult film has had on so many of those in the worlds of movies, popular music, society life, and fashion from Valentino to Dolce & Gabbana. Image by image, this book retraces the astonishing itinerary of a work that is a supreme emblem and a source of inexhaustible style.

Jean-Pierre Dufreigne is a leader writer for the cultural section of L’Express, and a film critic who is enamoured of cinema. He has written eight novels and three essays. He has previously published Hitchcock Style at Assouline.