Pitti Palace hosts exhibition on Germana Marucelli, great fashion designer, pioneer of Made in Italy

From June 12 to Sept. 24, 2023, the Fashion Museum in Florence ’s Palazzo Pitti is hosting an exhibition dedicated to Germana Marucelli (Settignano, 1905 - Milan, 1983), the Florentine fashion designer who “invented” Made in Italy. Clothes and jewelry, works of art, photographs and sketches will be on display in the anthological exhibition that recounts, for the first time in a comprehensive way, the style, imagination and visions of she who was called an “intellectual seamstress” by Fernanda Pivano and a “rare interpreter of poetry” by Giuseppe Ungaretti.

Germana Marucelli (1905-1983). A visionary at the origins of Made in Italy is the title of the exhibition dedicated to the revolutionary Florentine fashion designer that can be visited in the fifteen new rooms of the Fashion Museum in Palazzo Pitti, reopened to visitors for this very occasion. About 150 pieces make up the rich and varied itinerary of the exhibition, organized by the Uffizi Galleries in collaboration with the Germana Marucelli Association and curated by Silvia Casagrande and Vanessa Gavioli. The aim of the exhibition is to acquaint the general public with one of the most emblematic figures of Made in Italy, an important voice in the cultural and economic rebirth of postwar Italy and beyond. Articulated as a journey backwards, from the early 1980s to the late 1940s, the exhibition evokes the historical scenario in which Made in Italy saw its birth in Florence, and more precisely in Palazzo Pitti.

In the spaces of the Fashion Museum, the clothes created by Marucelli are placed in dialogue with works of art and jewelry by Italian artists with whom she collaborated, such as Paolo Scheggi, Pietro Gentili and Getulio Alviani; great importance is given to the relationship between art, architecture, fashion, and culture in the broadest sense.

The exhibition therefore recreates the environments of both the designer’s cultural salon, the fulcrum of her activity in the 1940s and 1950s (and frequented by poets, artists and intellectuals such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo, Gillo Dorfles, Lucio Fontana, Massimo Campigli, Francesco Messina, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass, Giò Ponti, and philosopher Dino Formaggio) and of the atelier designed for her by Paolo Scheggi in 1964, so as to allow the visitor to enter directly into the place and historical moment when Fashion was being made.

Emphasis is placed in particular on the unique and ’multidisciplinary’ artistic path of the fashion designer, who, between innovative thrusts and continuous references to the great themes of the past, anticipated languages that are current today, placing herself to all intents and purposes as a pioneer of new trends and visions. Her stylistic research, which at times takes on anthropological tour court connotations, focuses on the creation of clothes that do not envelop the woman, but are an extension and interpretation of her. A new concept prevails in her for the fashion of the time, in which the woman is no longer a passive subject to be clothed with meaning, but on the contrary becomes an active component, reason and meaning. In her collections Germana Marucelli perfectly expresses the feminine soul of a time in constant change and channels its expressive potential.

Anchored in the Florentine Renaissance to the point of making it a way of life, she became a patron of the arts, the centerpiece of a cultural salon, “I Giovedì di Germana Marucelli,” and even the promoter of the poetry prize the “San Babila.”

Germana Marucelli, born at the turn of the century in Settignano on the outskirts of Florence, is considered to all intents and purposes the forerunner of Made in Italy. During the war period she began to develop her own style, independent of French haute couture and considered by many to be an anticipator of Dior’s New Look. In the late 1940s she joined Giovan Battista Giorgini in his battle for the affirmation of Italian fashion and participated enthusiastically in the first events in Florence that marked its debut: in February 1951 at Villa Torrigiani, followed in July 1952 at the Sala Bianca in Palazzo Pitti, the birthplace of the “Italian High Fashion Show.” From the beginning, her collections aroused great interest from the press, both domestic and international, and from American buyers. Considered one of the most active promoters of interdisciplinarity between fashion and art, Marucelli chose to devote her life to the former and nurtured an innate passion for the latter. Aware of the importance of the sense of belonging and of the richness of our civilization, she bases her creative work on two very strong inner movements: on the one hand the powerful call of history, and on the other the extraordinary sensitivity to the social, cultural and costume evolutions taking place. Always anticipating new frontiers, since her beginnings in the world of fashion she has set herself the lofty goal of helping women express themselves through clothing, conceived as “an instrument of irradiation of the self.”

“The constant relationship between Germana Marucelli’s sartorial creativity and the world of art that inspires her makes the exhibition that opens now at Palazzo Pitti an emblematic event,” says Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt: “right here in fact, in the Sala Bianca, the dressmaker had presented her models in the fashion shows conceived by Giovanni Battista Giorgini, a brand new example of contact between the world of fashion and that of the museum, a sacred place of a culture without hierarchies and divisions by genres.”

“Fashion, art, culture: Germana Marucelli,” says curator Silvia Casagrande, “was a fusion of these elements in absolute purity. Through her life it is now possible to read in a transversal way an important part of the history of our time.”

“Dress as art in motion, dress as refined elegance, dress as memory in time,” comments costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. “This was and is Germana Marucelli, a woman who transformed thoughts and poetry into fabric making herself and the woman she imagined eternal. The first retrospective dedicated to the artist in the cradle of Italian art, a path backwards for an eternal dialogue between fashion and art... ”.

Pitti Palace hosts exhibition on Germana Marucelli, great fashion designer, pioneer of Made in Italy

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