Across Art and Fashion, a new exhibition on in Florence and Prato until April 2017, involves several venues, including the Ferragamo Museum, the National Central Library, Palazzo Pitti’s Costume and Art Galleries, the Uffizi and the Marino Marini Museum, as well as Prato’s Textile Museum.
“Is fashion art?” is the question posed by the exhibition, which addresses that complex relationship by exploring forms of dialogue between the worlds of art and fashion, including reciprocal inspirations, overlaps and collaborations from the experiences of the Pre-Raphaelites to those of Futurism, Surrealism and Radical Fashion.
The exhibition focuses primarily on the work of Salvatore Ferragamo, who was inspired by the avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century, ateliers of the 1950s and 1960s, the advent of the culture of celebrities and the experimentation of the 1990s.
Highlights of the exhibition in Florence are the lobster dress made in the 1930s by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a dress designed by Yves Saint Laurent, inspired by Piet Mondrian.
“Nostalgia for the Future in Post-War Artistic Fabrics” is the title of the Prato extension of the exhibition, which features designs by leading Italian stylists, such as Bruno Munari and Franco Gentilini, who competed with their bold prints in the ninth, tenth and eleventh Milan Triennale.
More information is available on the Ferragamo website.