Prato

The exhibition brings together clothes, textiles and fashion illustrations from the late 18th century to the 1950s. The aim is to tell the story of how technical progress and mechanical inventions transformed and accelerated the pace of weaving and tailoring, bringing about enormous changes in costume and contemporary society. Each display case narrates these transitions through objects selected from the Museum's collections, highlighting, for each historical period, the changes in style in textiles, but also in the styles of men's and women's garments. The exhibition route starts from the first display case on the left, just across the threshold of the room.

The new exhibition features more than 100 objects including men’s and women’s clothing, clothing textiles and furnishing fabrics, fashion plates, sample books, and fashion accessories that document the transformations of the textile industry Displayed in chronological order, the exhibition illustrates the extraordinary transformations of textile design and the changes in fashion that have taken place over a period of time in which the relationship between tradition and modernity, between the uniqueness of the artistic product and the replicability of the serial product, became the theme of a heated debate on the applied arts. With their artistic and professional experiences (as evidenced by the exhibited works by William Morris, Mariano Fortuny, Raoul Dufy, Gio Ponti, Lucio Fontana, Elsa Schiaparelli, Maria Monaci Gallenga), the protagonists of this long journey – textile designers and fashion creators – have nevertheless left a trace and an important contribution in the history of style and design.