While in Florence, the Museum of Costume and Fashion in Palazzo Pitti reopens after four years, the debate is rekindled on the absence in Italy of a structure and a project that narrates fashion as a cultural phenomenon in all respects
by Domenico Casoria
Last July, the Museum of Costume and Fashion at Palazzo Pitti in Florence reopened after being closed for four years, with eight new rooms. The exhibition covers three centuries of fashion – from the 18th century to contemporary times – but the main novelty is that, for the first time, the organisation follows a historical-chronological and not a thematic criterion. The one in Florence is, for all intents and purposes, a precedent in the exhibition of fashion at the museum level, but the news has rekindled the spotlight on the need – now uniquely Italian – to have a main fashion museum. And, more importantly, whether it needs to exist at all.
What a Museum of Fashion is really for
Journalists, historians, politicians, and academics have inserted themselves into the long diatribe of whether a fashion museum is really needed. Far from wishing to pass judgement, after 40 years of badly told tales, in Italy, the lack of a centre to tell the story of fashion as a cultural phenomenon is evident, especially in comparison with other countries. There is no need, in fact, to bother great thinkers to understand how much a museum institution with a high profile and planning – of whatever kind – is necessary to build a shared identity.
The word ‘museum’ undoubtedly catapults fashion into the fratricidal feud with art, but as Matteo Augello pointed out in Curating Italian Fashion, published by Bloomsbury in 2022, fashion needs no intellectual justification to exist. However, despite the fact that fashion is everywhere – on the street, in the home, in our intimate worlds and in our relationships with others – in Italy, it lacks a common recognition and a place that collects, narrates and showcases its cultural value.
The emblematic Italian case
The Italian case is emblematic because it tells of a country that is divided into many small fragments – stylistic and cultural – but which at the same time has in its DNA an idea of fashion and a concept of style that operate under the surface, traceable according to some scholars to the Renaissance. And yet, it is enough to discuss fashion with any layman to understand the shortcomings of a country that struggles to consider fashion as the cultural phenomenon par excellence.
Certainly, the idea of a fashion museum starts off weak, or perhaps it is already an outdated issue, especially if we consider that since the advent of the internet, fashion has taken on a myriad of facets. In addition, there is the unavoidable readjustment forced by social networks without considering the volatility of trends and the speed with which they alternate on the catwalk and on our bodies.
An ever-changing cultural heritage
So, what should we do with the cultural heritage that fashion generates in its continuous transformation? The most obvious solution once again starts from the territory, from fashion associations and local collections, which, strengthened, would become an irrepressible forge. But without forgetting where we are going nationally, as a country, with a focused perspective and a common project. In other words, we need a deus ex machina capable of understanding that a complex system such as fashion must be understood in depth, in its cultural and social folds. An entity capable of making fashion a fully-fledged state affair.
Read also:
- Fashion archives are culture: why not open them up to everyone?
- About heritage: Gucci and Ferragamo’s Archives