Florence, collection of very rare lace enters LineaPiù Historical Archives

An important collection of extremely rare lace, the Schwarzenberg Collection, becomes part of theLineapiù Historical Archive, the fund with the Florentine company’s experimental knitwear objects, inaugurated in 2012. The Schwarzenberg Collection is a unique fund composed, of 252 lace items of great rarity and exceptional workmanship that tell five centuries of European history through the extraordinary lace items that now enrich the “Room of Rare” of the LineaPiù Historical Archives.

The Schwarzenberg Collection includes pieces ranging from the 16th century to the 20th century. The acquisition, says Lineapiù Italia S.p.A., is “a new sign dedicated to the relationship between conservation and collecting, documentation and study, manufacturing history and artistic research.” The Sala dei Rari, born in 2018 from the passion of Alessandro Bastagli, President of Lineapiù Italia, is organized within a 150-square-meter space designed by architect Elio di Franco. The room goes on to consolidate the Lineapiù Historical Archives as one of the major documentation centers for the preservation of knitting yarns and textile materials: a museum collection of Lace, Embroidery and Textile Samples consisting of 460 antique volumes and more than 1,500 laces.

The recent acquisition of the lace collection that belonged to Prince Karl Erkinger Schwarzenberg is part of an existing museum context in the Rare Room of the Lineapiù Historical Archives: it is, LineaPiù explains, “a unique collection for the sublime quality of the artifacts, for the wide variety of types it contains, and for the great taste and expertise with which the Prince was able to enrich the collection he inherited.” The layout of the new collection follows a historical and intuitive path, arranged by era, centers of production and types, with comparisons with similar artifacts preserved in various museum collections around the world, offering a path of stylistic evolution in fashion.

It starts with Old Point embroideries that are placed at the origins of the evolution of lace in the first half of the 16th century to a collection of fifteen handkerchiefs made in white embroidery from the second half of the 19th century and some examples of needle lace reproduced by the Burano School of Lace in the 20th century. The collection is accompanied by descriptive data sheets flanked by photographs for each artifact to better document the various manufactures and techniques of making through the different eras. Thus becomes available for consultation by scholars specializing in the field of fashion and artistic production a “cultural asset” that can become a topic of study in the fashion industry.

Florence, collection of very rare lace enters LineaPiù Historical Archives

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