March 04, 2019
Animalia Fashion in Firenze
An unexpected encounter between Haute Couture and Nature at Pitti Palace to discover the wonders of the animal world!
Clothes like sculptures, fabric and embroidery like paintings: everything in the rooms of the Museum of Costume and Fashion in Pitti Palace helps to recreate a kind of zoological stroll amid the creations of contemporary designers conjuring up the most unexpected of animal worlds. From France and Italy to China and Russia, the clothing on display provides visitors with an astonishing overview of what Nature has to offer Haute Couture in terms of inspiration and atmospherics, and Art as a product of imagination and creativity. Fashion can take us by surprise, it can unleash our imagination, it can involve us in a new game of identification and suggestion.
Thus “Animalia Fashion” is one of the most surprising and evocative installations in the field of Haute Couture, pure poetry in the juxtapositions proposed, yet at the same time an invitation to reflect on the wonders of the universe, if we consider the arrangement conceived as a fantastic, hyperbolic natural history museum. Clothing, accessories and jewels become an experience, a journey of exploration probing the history of zoological science but, above all, a discovery of shapes and colours that conjure up images of animals both common and rare. Contemporary style – the exhibition showcases items created between 2000 and 2018, loaned by famous fashion houses and emerging stylists alike – expresses its outstanding creative power thanks also to unexpected juxtapositions in the museum rooms, with real stuffed animals and snakes in formaldehyde loaned by Florence’s Museo di Storia Naturale La Specola and spiders (in showcases) loaned by the Associazione Italiana di Aracnologia, but also with old master paintings and exhibits from the Museo di Antropologia ed Etnografia and with reproductions of drawings taken from old bestiaries and pages from medieval tacuina sanitatis.