July 19, 2024

The Fashion and Costume Museum in the Pitti Palace reopens after three years

One of the world's most important collections dedicated to fashion and costume reopens with eight new rooms

Twenty rare and iconic historical dresses, displayed in eight new rooms, to tell in the refined language of precious fabrics and the highest tailoring two centuries of fashion, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: thus, after the opening last December of the spaces dedicated to the fashion of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the total renovation of the Costume Museum of the Pitti Palace is concluded. The Gallery reopens in its entirety, offering itself to visitors in a general rearrangement that has changed, modernizing and updating, its face and aesthetics entirely. For the first time in the museum's history at the center of the tour is the main nucleus of clothes in the collection, ordered according to historical-chronological criteria that accompany the visitor through the complex viaticum of the history of costume and fashion: about sixty garments from the 18th to the 21st century and as many accessories including shoes, bags, fans, umbrellas, gloves, and hats. All of this in dialogue with a range of paintings from the Uffizi Galleries' collections, carefully chosen to serve as a counterpoint to the fashion creations: from great eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraitists such as Carle Vanloo, Laurent Pecheux and Jean-Sébastien Rouillard, Clemente Alberi and Giuseppe Colzi de' Cavalcanti to elegant portraits of the mature nineteenth century by Tito Conti, Giovanni Boldini, Edoardo Gelli and Vittorio Corcos; to some of the most relevant artists of the Italian avant-garde, such as Massimo Campigli, Giulio Turcato, Corrado Cagli and Alberto Burri put in relation with leading twentieth-century fashion designers.

THE NEW HALLS: FASHION IN THE SEVEN IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES

In the newly opened rooms one can admire luxurious 18th-century gowns as typical examples of robe à la française. Then there are Empire-style garments, such as one in ivory silk crepe, adorned with silver-foil embroidery, which belonged to Massimilla Celano, consort of Prailo Mayo, third son of the governor of the Abruzzi principality of Francavilla. It continues with garments from the Restoration period, when the waistline was lowered again and elaborate appliqués emerged from the garments like sculptural bas-reliefs: evidence of this can be found in the afternoon dress dated 1825, in creeping pile taffetas worked in stripe and palmette motifs. Rare 19th-century wedding dresses are also on display along the route. Evening outfits, on the other hand, take center stage in fin de siècle fashion, and prominent among them is Catherine Donovan's black mechanical needle-net dress on ivory silk satin. Signed Raphael Goudstikker, on the other hand, is the Liberty robe in yellow and green chiffon that belonged to Countess Margaret Brinton White Savorgnan di Brazzà. Finally, a room is dedicated to the sophisticated clothing of the early twentieth century, inspired by the estheticizing climate of the time, on the wave of the new liberation of the female body embodied by the tubular forms of Mariano Fortuny's creations for Eleonora Duse and by Donna Franca Florio's Kimono home dress by Jacques Doucet, the father of French fashion, thanks to his interior dresses, among the most beloved tailors of the divas of the time. Completing the exhibition are a suite of paintings-chosen to demonstrate how costume is integrally a cultural and often artistic phenomenon-and a selection of more than sixty accessories including shoes, hats, fans, parasols, and handbags, which enrich the collection, making it one of the most important in the world.

20TH CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY FASHION ROOMS OPENED LAST DECEMBER

There is the theatrical 'cloak-kimono' created by Mariano Fortuny for Eleonora Duse, the 1920s 'flapper' tunic by Chanel, the sequined splendor of the outfit worn by Franca Florio and the flamboyant evening gowns by Elsa Schiaparelli, to the regal luxury of the creations by Emilio Schubert, the tailor of the divas in the 1950s (his garments for Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren are famous). And again, the geometric extravagances of Patty Pravo's dress designed in the early 1980s by Gianni Versace, the essential sensuality of the black sheath designed by Jean Paul Gaultier and made famous by Madonna, the dreamy allure of Gianfranco Ferré's collection for Dior in the 1990s.

The history of taste in fashion in the century of a thousand styles, the twentieth century, along with that of the early years of the current millennium, is exhibited and told through a selection of masterpieces in the renovated Museum of Fashion and Costume at the Pitti Palace. Twelve new rooms (plus the nineteenth-century Saloncino da Ballo), thus return to be open to visitors forty years after the founding of this section of the Galleries (exterminated collection, consisting of more than 15 thousand pieces from the sixteenth century to the present).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ON THE FASHION AND COSTUME MUSEUM IN PITTI PALACE

The Fashion and Costume Museum in the Pitti Palace was inaugurated as the Galleria del Costume on 8 October 1983 by Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti, a pivotal figure in the formation of the Pitti Palace's current museum complex. The idea of establishing a gallery dedicated to historical costumes - the first in Italy - had matured in the late 1970s, as part of the reorganisation of the Museo degli Argenti, of which Piacenti was director. Immediately after the opening of the Museum, Tirelli donated a substantial nucleus of his collection, consisting not only of historical costumes of great value, but also stage costumes accompanied by sketches documenting their creative genesis. The authors of the theatrical, film and television material included the names of Piero Tosi, Pier Luigi Pizzi, Gabriella Pescucci, Gae Aulenti, Vera Marzot, Carlo Diappi, Alberto Verso, Fabrizio Monteverde and Bice Brichetto. During the years of Piacenti's directorship, the collection grew exponentially. Among the most significant donations were those of Tornabuoni-Lineapiù, Emilio Pucci and Roberta di Camerino. By the ten-year anniversary of the museum's foundation, the collection numbered thousands of pieces and had, in addition to five permanent selections, nine themed exhibitions, each dedicated to a particular aspect of the evolution of fashion. In recent years, with Eike Schmidt at the helm of the Uffizi Galleries, the Fashion Museum has opened its collections to the contemporary world, thanks also to recent donations from the Centro di Firenze per la Moda Italiana and Pitti Immagine, which have made it possible to integrate numerous men's pieces with the existing collections, mainly focused on women's fashion. The museum's holdings have also been fully digitised, through photographic and cataloguing campaigns, in order to include them in the Digital Archives of the Galleries.