The twenty rooms of Museum of Costume and Fashion at Palazzo Pitti in Florence reopen to the public after nearly five years of closure and a complete redesign. The Uffizi Galleries now house one of the world's most important collections of costume and fashion history, with 15,000 objects from the eighteenth century to the present day, including sixty dresses and as many accessories such as shoes, hats, fans, parasols, and bags. And, while the Museum of Costume and Fashion, founded in 1983, has previously only exhibited thematic selections, for the first time, a main nucleus has been identified and ordered according to an encyclopedic criterion, which will remain constant despite the rotations required for conservation purposes. Precious fabrics and high tailoring that evolve over the centuries: eighteenth-century dresses, typically robe à la française, Empire-style clothes from the Restoration period, garments from the Romantic age, and the bourgeois period of the late nineteenth century, mostly Italian but also European and American. In the rooms overlooking the Boboli Gardens, alongside the clothes, there are paintings, sculptures, and vases made in the same years, creating a dialogue that adds depth to the history from which they come.
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