
By Rebecca Ceccatelli. Cover image: Museum of Fashion and Costume at Palazzo Pitti, view of the new display.
Palazzo Pitti in Florence returns to offer the Museum of Costume and Fashion and its unveiled stars. Finally, this magical place has reopened its doors with a new display, 12 rooms and 50 iconic creations, taking beauty-hungry visitors on a journey from the Jazz Age to Chanel, Dior, Gucci and Gaultier. The exhibition space is located within the Palazzina della Meridiana at Palazzo Pitti. Far from a mere historical revival, it is anything but a passive journey through the ages.
From the times of Grand Prince Ferdinand de’ Medici to Giambattista Giorgini, dynamism, interactions, and stars have always animated the southern wing of the Palace with courtly dances and astronomical studies.
The Museum of Fashion and Costume in Palazzo Pitti, founded in 1983, is the first state museum in Italy to be dedicated to preserving the history of fashion and its social significance.
It is no coincidence that the Museum is located inside the Palace, whose paths have always been intertwined with the fashion panorama, and in a prolific region for the world of textile production and styling.

Palazzo Pitti, Sala Bianca, 12th of February 1951, Italian couture fashion show organized by Giambattista Giorgini.
Whether it’s due to the noble Duchess Eleonora di Toledo – who set fashion rules at court with her sophisticated taste in the 1500s – or to the visionary Giambattista Giorgini – who chose the Sala Bianca of the Palace as the perfect venue for the show that marked the birth of Italian Haute Couture in 1952 – Palazzo Pitti has consistently remained a focal point for the fashion industry.
Recently, the institution was able to officially announce the reopening of its fashion museum after a 3-year closure due to the pandemic.
Following a series of challenging restorations and after closing to the public, the Museum has reopened with a new display of 50 iconic creations in 12 rooms at Palazzina della Meridiana, now freed from glass showcases.
Palazzo Pitti’s Costume Museum returns within extra beauty
Despite the potential risks involved, the garments are now free from restrictions, ready to be admired from every angle on eye-catching red velvet podiums, in a kind of liturgy where they are the icons. Like any respectable icon, it is our responsibility to protect them. To shield the precious fabrics, which are highly sensitive to light, the Museum will replace the pieces with new garments from the collection’s archives every few months, also allowing for a more diversified arrangement.
Now, nothing will keep the collection “locked in the closet” anymore, literally. The iconic pieces will be showcased in a brand-new display that takes advantage of strong contrasts of light and shadow created by the precious textiles.
To celebrate the historic reopening, the exhibition “The Permanent Collection: The Twentieth Century” takes visitors on a journey through the past century of fashion. Covering from the early 1900s to recent times, it is one of the most relevant exhibitions in the world and a unique experience in Italy.
Ready to explore the evolution of fashion from the flapper explosion of the 1920s, the classic silhouettes of the interwar years, to the playful swinging sixties and the new materials of the 1990s?
This journey showcases iconic pieces that have defined the history of fashion, some of which may appear more contemporary than one might believe. Will fashion ever stop coming back into fashion?
The grace of freedom: at Palazzo Pitti Costume Museum Mariano Fortuny and the early century
Corsets, unnatural silhouettes, and restrictions? Thank you, next. The twentieth century marked the beginning of women’s liberation from the fashion restrictions that constrained their bodies in cages. Women were now free to enjoy the luxury of fabrics that gently draped over the only forms they wanted to acknowledge: their natural ones.
Palazzo Pitti is proud to present and possess one of the early examples of fabric elasticity achieved through fabric over-pleating, ensuring mobility and freedom: the Delphos tunic (circa 1911). This tunic is a salmon-coloured variant of the famous tunic by Mariano Fortuny, inspired by the renowned Greek sculpture “Charioteer of Delphi”. Certainly, an indisputable revolution to enter the new century, isn’t it?

The flapper revolution. Who’s up for a bit of swing?
A young woman enters a jazz club in the revolutionary 1920s. She sports a short bobbed haircut, and a cigarette dangles from her red lipstick-adorned lips. Her skirt reaches just below the knee and twirls to the rhythm of the Charleston. She’s known as a flapper and is admired for her freedom.
This era is characterised by short and fringed dresses that move elegantly with the wearer. The hair is short and gathered or sometimes replaced by stylish wigs. Comfortable Mary Jane shoes allow for easy movement of the feet.
The second exhibition room showcases the iconic elements of the transoceanic trend, featuring a black dress with fringes made of glass straws by Maria Monaci Gallenga, golden wigs, and Coco Chanel’s iconic Charleston dress (1924), designed by Gabrielle Chanel, who boldly interpreted the new standards of feminine beauty in the first post-war period.



Sartorial geometry: Madeleine Vionnet and the bias cut of the interwar period
Despite the fear of a new war outbreak in the 1930s, high society continued to value eveningwear as a must-have. In the quest for a more elegant and subdued silhouette, high-bourgeois women once again focused on their waistlines. They enhanced their forms with the bias cut pioneered by the timeless designer Madeleine Vionnet. Her labels were signed, quite literally, with her fingerprint, adding a personal touch. A silver constellation stands out at the centre of the room on the dense drape of a milky-white fabric in the evening dress from 1932. A testament to the designer’s mastery, Vionnet is not only a curator of elegance and femininity but also of the most exquisite details—in this case, a precise embroidery of stars cascading from the alluring fluid bodice towards the hem.

New post-war years, New Look: Christian Dior and its devotees in Palazzo Pitti’s Costume Museum rooms
In the post-war embrace of newfound optimism, fashion experienced a resurgence of creativity, soaring beyond the shadows of conflict. A sartorial renaissance blossomed, weaving threads of resilience into the fabric of style. As society shook off the constraints of wartime austerity, designers began to create a vibrant tapestry of hope. With the advent of the New Look, corsets reclaimed the spotlight alongside voluminous skirts, merging 1930s style with nods to 19th-century looks. Italian fashion also began to assert its independence from French couture thanks to Giambattista Giorgini and the couturiers who participated in his celebrations. These included Emilio Schubert, Jole Veneziani, and Maison Carosa, featured in the room, who used luminous backdrop taffeta, canvas for stitched embroideries, and an unusual shocking pink shawl that would have made Schiaparelli proud!

Fashion as a beacon of liberation: bold and childish vibes of the 1960s and 70s
The path to self-expression was wide open. The 1960s and 1970s marked a revolution in the world of fashion as the youth generation entered the scene. Short dresses came with clean or minimalist lines, dominated by bold, colourful patterns that awakened people’s inner child in playful fashion collections adorned with beads or sequins. Federico Forquet was dubbed the Italian Dior by Irene Brin in Harper’s Bazaar for the revolutionary impact he brought to Italy with his linear and almost architectural style in crafting geometric patterns.
His regular geometry would be lost with the Florentine Emilio Pucci, who simply didn’t care about regularity! With his prints for Palazzo Pucci (a 1973 version at Palazzo Pitti), he revitalised the spirit of the era with optical effects and bold hues gracefully adorning high-quality silk. These words will be remembered during the immersion into some of the final rooms of the exhibition journey through time.

Direction: new millennium. Everything we have learned from the last years of the 20th century
Top models, elaborately structured fabrics and a desire to impress, much like the most recent Milan Fashion Week. Today’s fashion is indeed the sum of our past learnings, featuring both continuous revivals and new experiments heavily influenced by the late 20th century.
From the 1980s and their dual pop and streetwear aspects to the post-modern 90s and their style borderlessness and the new millennium, with the cult of vintage and the spread of gender fluidity as a universal language, today’s high-luxury maisons are gaining increasing popularity and cross the threshold of the century reaching our times.
The years flow rapidly towards the present day, and the journey inside the Palace comes to an end. The exhibition features iconic Gucci pieces (evening gown, 1987) alongside the famous dress worn by Madonna, designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier (1987), and one of the earliest uses of leather fabric to create a complete outfit by Paco Rabanne (1991-2).




As visitors of the 21st century, we can appreciate the timeless value of fashion through these exhibits. At last, Palazzo Pitti is bringing back a part of our past and making Florence a fashion capital once again.