One hundred years of fashion: a journey through the history of costume from 1860 to 1960 on display in Perugia

The exhibition The Italians and Fashion 1860 - 1960, running at the Museo Civico di Palazzo della Penna in Perugia from August 9 to September 8, 2019, takes visitors on a journey through the history of Italian costume, from the dawn of national unity to the first decade of the republic, through more than 150 photographs, 20 dresses, 20 historical sketches and numerous original objects and cameras. It will be possible to admire the fashion that distinguished Italian society: the nineteenth century, with bourgeois women enclosed in dresses with narrow corsets and wide skirts supported by special crinolines, adorned with lace and lace; commoners, wrapped in wide shawls and long skirts that descended to the floor; workers wearing party dresses; the wealthy bourgeoisie with mustaches, beards and dresses that were inspired by the fashion of the sovereigns, first King Victor Emmanuel II and then Umberto I. Then the twentieth century that, instead, twisted their profiles and fashions, revealing women’s ankles. Passing through the Fascist period, we arrive at the postwar period where, if men remained faithful to the jacket and tie, women distorted their clothes, which became shorter and more practical, choosing the suit as the model and sign of a complete recognition of equal dignity with the opposite sex.

The section of the exhibition devoted to historical photography displays more than 150 works, from theManodori Sagredo Archives, including some valuable originals from the mid-19th century. There is a connection between photography and clothing: both are tools of the language of appearance. The former as an image of a more or less distant past, the latter as an intention to show oneself to others as one wants one’s personality, also made up of aesthetics of taste, to be revealed. Even in photographs, whoever is photographed is concerned that the best image of him remains, since the photograph will survive and the idea of his person, what he was, will be modulated on the basis of the photographic portrait itself. The official date of the birth of photography, 1839, coincides with the new fashion of dress, both male and female, and follows the waning of the Napoleonic era by opening the Romantic age marked by more than ever chastened, camouflaged clothes coinciding with the imagery of the “well-thinking” nineteenth century.

This coincidence will persist, even through the transformations and changes of the early twentieth century, World War I, the fascist years and the post-World War II period, until the well-known Sixty-Eight. Throughout this long time, photography records the fashion manners of ordinary Italians, to whom high fashion suggests reference models, from which simpler and more modest forms are taken. The fashions of Italians thus find, in photographs, the mirror of a personal identity and not only reflect the types of fashion dictated by great tailors or high society figures, but interpret what can be called the social dress with which each person presents himself in the world. The dress in fact corresponds to its time but also to the “character” in which each person finds, builds or identifies his or her personality, which thus appears more manifest. At the same time, the photographs document and re-present history, and in it the clothes find the ultimate meaning, that of a social and cultural belonging.

This exhibition intends to retrace not only the transformations of clothing and the cultural nexuses it expresses, but it also wants to be a visual archive of the great history of appearing. In fact, in each pose, not only the face, gesture, and attitude of the men and women photographed are illuminated, but also their dress, their hat like jacket or skirt now wide now soft, now long now short. The work of so many photographers, often amateur or even improvised, alongside some of the most prestigious signatures, such as Ghitta Carell or Luxardo, builds, finally, the great photographic album of the clothing of Italians from 1860 to 1960, that is, from the birth of the united and free Italy until the decade that saw the germination of many other parallel types of dressing, such as casual or so-called sporty.

A section of the exhibition is organized in collaboration with Maison Gattinoni Couture and curated by its President Stefano Dominella. Gattinoni withHaute C outure suggested the Italians and created a starting point for Made in Italy. Here then is the perfect narrative of a journey, through the Gattinoni style, with a particular focus on the 1950s and 1960s, when “Rebirth and Revolution” created a perfect balance. It was in the climate of emergency caused by the war that Italian creativity, combined with an ancient craft tradition, formed an explosive cocktail that would bear fruit in the aftermath of the conflict. Then, against the backdrop of the Marshall Plan,Italy was transformed into a U.S. colony. It was the time when Rome, with its enchanted atmosphere of ruins, sunsets, basilicas, imposed itself in the collective imagination as the land of dreams.

It was precisely through those dreams that Fernanda Gattinoni founded, in 1946, the eponymous label and became, very soon, the undisputed protagonist of international fashion. Beginning in the second half of the 1940s, her atelier became a fixed destination for the international jet set in the capital of Italy. Among her clients, in addition to First Ladies, Ambassadors and Aristocracy - from Evita Peron to Princess Elvina Pallavicini, to Claire Boothe Luce - were numerous Italian and international movie stars including Anouk Aimèe, Ingrid Bergman, Lucia Bosè, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Rossella Falk, Audrey Hepburn, Gina Lollobrigida, Anna Magnani, Kim Novak, Charlotte Rampling, Lana Turner, and Monica Vitti.

The Maison Gattinoni was distinguished by beautiful lines, sophisticated elegance combined with practicality, a guarantee of long tradition of craftsmanship, quality and solidity of materials, a love of drapery and a marked inclination toward understatement. The couturier loved to construct her gowns with endless drapery, with bustiers embroidered by skilled hands and wide, rustling skirts. Twenty iconic creations will also be on display, alongside sketches signed by Brunetta, Guido Cozzolino and Antonio Pascali, drawn from thehistorical Fernanda and Raniero Gattinoni archives.

For all information you can call +39 075.9477727 or send an email to segreteria@munus.com.

Source: press release

One hundred years of fashion: a journey through the history of costume from 1860 to 1960 on display in Perugia

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