Heritage, Fabric and fashion histories

The exhibition celebrates the museum’s fortieth anniversary with an event that explores the relationship between fabric and fashion and an itinerary that extends from the initial collections to the latest donations. 

HERITAGE is a journey through the Museum’s collections of fashion and fabrics spanning 600 years. It includes a diverse anthology of textiles, clothing and accessories, swatch books, fashion plates and historic fashion journals, original fashion sketches and rare editions of textile-bound books, which range from the sixteenth century to the nineteen-sixties. 

Within the exhibition, fashion and fabrics converse through the centuries. In this manner, sixteenth century embroidered linen shirts interact with furnishing fabrics made from the same materials. Eighteenth-century textiles express styles that are linked to different uses, ranging from furnishings to liturgical and secular clothing, while military and court garments favour colours, decorations and symbols that reference formal representation. At the same time, fashion plates recount the transfer of functions from Oriental culture to European couture. Examples of women’s clothing from the twentieth century narrate the transformation of design that is oriented in the selection of styles which look to contemporary and classical art until you reach a collection of formal wear that symbolically articulates sixty years of social and stylistic changes almost every decade. New perspectives to learn about our past and to invent our future.