Visit to Museums and Foundations: Galleria del Costume - Palazzo Pitti
The Galleria del Costume is one of the most important museums in Italy dedicated to the history of fashion. Over 6,000 items (clothing, textiles, accessories) dating from the 16th century to the 1920s are displayed on a rotating basis. Visit duration from 10 to 11 a.m.
Accessibility for the disabled.
Guided and free visit
Reservations required - tel. + 390 055 23 40 742; fax + 30 055 24 41 45
prenotazioni@cscsigma.it
Galleria del Costume - Palazzo Pitti Firenze
Piazza de' Pitti, 1, 50125 Florence, Italy
The first state-operated museum dedicated entirely to study and preservation of costumes, accessories, and fabrics, the Costume Gallery was created in 1983 under the direction of Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti.
Its prestigious headquarters is the neoclassical Palazzina della Meridiana ordered built by Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine in 1776 on the south side of Palazzo Pitti.
Today, the museum storage rooms preserve a collection of more than 6000 items, including ancient and modern garments, accessories, and costumes for the theater and the cinema of great documentary value.
It is a unique gallery whose center is the famous Medici collection, among the world’s oldest, made up of the burial clothes worn by Cosimo I Grand Duke of Tuscany, his wife Eleonora de Toledo, and their son Don Garzia, all restored in the museum’s own restoration shops. A significant place is
also reserved for contemporary costume, with selected nuclei representing the greatest protagonists of international high fashion and prêt-à-porter, such as Worth, Poiret, Vionnet, Capucci, Missoni, Valentino, Pucci, Ferrè, and Yves Saint Laurent, to name only a few.
Most of the accessions come from public and private donations and often the wardrobes of famous personalities, either of historic importance or known for their influence on aesthetics in a given era, like the Sicilian noblewoman Franca Florio and Eleonora Duse; or from collections patiently and carefully put together by such figures as Umberto Tirelli, founder of one of Italy’s most prestigious and internationally-famous theatrical and cinematographic costume houses.
Due to their extreme organic fragility, the exhibits are alternated in two-year cycles according to a thematic and chronological exhibition scheme that runs from the 18th to the 20th centuries; at the same time, the Gallery holds important monographic exhibitions in specific rooms, clear testimonies to the progress made in the study of costume and fashion that are closely linked to this extraordinary collection.
See details >>
Its prestigious headquarters is the neoclassical Palazzina della Meridiana ordered built by Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine in 1776 on the south side of Palazzo Pitti.
Today, the museum storage rooms preserve a collection of more than 6000 items, including ancient and modern garments, accessories, and costumes for the theater and the cinema of great documentary value.
It is a unique gallery whose center is the famous Medici collection, among the world’s oldest, made up of the burial clothes worn by Cosimo I Grand Duke of Tuscany, his wife Eleonora de Toledo, and their son Don Garzia, all restored in the museum’s own restoration shops. A significant place is
also reserved for contemporary costume, with selected nuclei representing the greatest protagonists of international high fashion and prêt-à-porter, such as Worth, Poiret, Vionnet, Capucci, Missoni, Valentino, Pucci, Ferrè, and Yves Saint Laurent, to name only a few.
Most of the accessions come from public and private donations and often the wardrobes of famous personalities, either of historic importance or known for their influence on aesthetics in a given era, like the Sicilian noblewoman Franca Florio and Eleonora Duse; or from collections patiently and carefully put together by such figures as Umberto Tirelli, founder of one of Italy’s most prestigious and internationally-famous theatrical and cinematographic costume houses.
Due to their extreme organic fragility, the exhibits are alternated in two-year cycles according to a thematic and chronological exhibition scheme that runs from the 18th to the 20th centuries; at the same time, the Gallery holds important monographic exhibitions in specific rooms, clear testimonies to the progress made in the study of costume and fashion that are closely linked to this extraordinary collection.
See details >>