The Ephemeral Museum of Fashion, Notes for an Ideal Museum

If you’re heading to Florence this summer, a new exhibition at the Palazzo Pitti will make you reflect on what an ideal fashion museum would be like. Curated by Olivier Saillard, director of the Musée Galliera in Paris, in collaboration with the Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery and the Gallerie degli Uffizi, The Ephemeral Museum of Fashion will showcase pieces from the archives of the Palazzo Pitti’s Costume and Fashion Gallery, while investigating the mechanisms of fashion and reflecting on their broader implications.

The 19th- and 20th-century works selected for the exhibition recount moments in the history of fashion and costume and this will be brought up to date with contemporary pieces recently acquired by Palais Galliera and Palazzo Pitti

"The Ephemeral Museum is an occasion; an opportunity to reinvent Palazzo Pitti's Galleria del Costume e della Moda," says Saillard.

In his curatorial notes, Saillard writes: "On mannequins of wood and of wax, or abandoned on armchairs and seats, suspended as soft sculptures, reclining like sleeping beauties, the garments are the shipwrecked waifs of a mysterious, fragile and caduceus museum.”

He adds, “It will disappear in a few months' time, victim and witness to passing time. It is our hope that it may be reborn in another time, another place, within the fickle walls of a museum, in the forgotten spaces of a building. That it will continue to raise questions about the transient nature of fashion but also about its poetic vitality; that in its nomadic meanders, it will to draw together sublime foundations and shifting frontiers; as it incessantly redefines itself, that it will become most beautiful, the fairest of all the world's museums."

The exhibition will open June 13 and run until October 22