Animalia Fashion

The great exhibition until May 5 at the Museum of Costume and Fashion at Palazzo Pitti

Dresses such as sculptures, fabrics and embroidery like paintings: everything contributes to recreate, in the rooms of the Palazzo Pitti Museum of Costume and Fashion, a kind of zoological walk among the creations of contemporary designers that evoke the most unexpected animal world. From France to China, from Russia to Italy, the clothes on display propose a surprising catalog of what Alta Moda has to offer to Nature in terms of inspiration and suggestion, and to Art as a product of fantasy and genius.

Do not expect leopard spots; big absent zebra and tiger, to make room for insects, hedgehogs, swans, lobsters, snakes, fish, shells and corals, meaning that Fashion is Art and as such "monkey of Nature".

The Animalia Fashion exhibition thus becomes one of the most surprising and suggestive installations in the field of Haute Couture. The contemporary style - examples from 2000 to 2018 are exhibited, lent by the most famous fashion houses and emerging stylists - expresses its extraordinary creative power thanks to unexpected combinations with real stuffed animals and reptiles in formaldehyde, loaned by the Florentine Museum of Natural History La Specola, with spiders (in teche) lent by the Italian Association of Arachnology, but also with antique paintings and objects from the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of Florence, and with reproductions of drawings drawn from ancient bestiaries and pages from tacu medieval sanitatis.

The 18 exhibition halls open with the section dedicated to the spiders and then continue with the swans, shells, hedgehogs, fish, corals, parrots, lobsters, babirussa, porcupinefish, snakes, beetles, flies, bees, crocodiles and end with butterflies.

Design, design and care of the exhibition
Patricia Lurati
Scientific Committee
Eva Desiderio, Olivier Saillard, Eike Schmidt