After a long period, the Fashion and Costume Museum at Pitti Palace, Florence, is finally back on view in its entirety, and completely renovated.
It is the oldest museum of its kind in all of Italy, which - along with the Palatina Gallery and the Boboli Gardens, the Medici Treasure Museum and the Gallery of Modern Art - enriches the extraordinary museum offerings of the Pitti Palace complex.
The new display is not limited to a simple exhibition of clothes and accessories, mainly Italian, from the 18th to the 21st century, but contextualizes them by making them dialogue with other objects (paintings, sculptures, pottery), recreating evocative atmospheres of their respective eras. And so we can admire, for example, one of the dresses worn by the “divine” actress Eleonora Duse, next to a marble bust depicting her; or one of the elegant and seductive ladies painted by Giovanni Boldini, next to a “Belle Époque” dress from the same period.
Although the oldest pieces include the 16th-century funeral gowns of Cosimo I, the first Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his consort Eleanor of Toledo, the main core of the collection (more than 15,000 pieces on display in rotation) ranges from 18th-century “French-style” fashion to the Empire style of the early 19th century, from “bourgeois” style to the 1980s, with some creations by famous Italian maisons that have made fashion history around the world.
