1980-2020

In 1980, Grazietta Butazzi curated the exhibition at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan "1922-1943: Vent’anni di moda italiana". This experience enabled us to raise central questions about the cultural status of fashion in relation to the exhibition machine and the museum at the beginning of a decade, the 1980s, that proved fundamental not only in developing the fashion exhibition but above all in defining fashion itself as a discipline, through the focus on themes and issues such as the reconstruction of its history, the conservation of objects and the problem of cultural and museum exhibition practices in relation to commercial forms of display. Retrieving this exhibition means moving between an account of an important exhibition event and the analysis of its role within fashion studies, in years when, especially in Italy, an awareness developed of the need to imagine devices and institutions capable of preserving and studying fashion. Looking at this exhibition today means reflecting primarily on the Italian situation, because even today one of the central issues in Italy is the absence of institutions in the promotion of a national fashion museum capable of dealing fully with the international scope of fashion. The exhibition, curated by Grazietta Butazzi with the coordination of Alessandra Mottola Molfino, was a pioneering project in the Italian panorama of fashion exhibitions. It proved comparable to the work of Diana Vreeland starting from 1972, when she began her career at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as Special Consultant and as a first gesture organised the exhibition "The World of Balenciaga". The exhibition at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum directly addressed the 20th century. Therefore, as it evolved, it began to develop methods of research, conservation and display that were different from those used for garments and objects from the more distant past, which are usually placed in the costume category. It was a fashion exhibition and, over the years (above all through the catalogue), it has become a landmark for those seeking to understand contemporary fashion. "1922-1943: Vent’anni di moda italiana" in 1980 enclosed a debate over the organisation of fashion exhibitions that is still relevant today at the Italian and international levels. In fact, this exhibition directly addressed contemporary fashion, with the problems of exhibiting it, making it relevant to the visitor, and at the same time recognising the status of a cultural object that is collectable. This was a project that not only questioned the exhibition mechanism but also the way of exhibiting in relation to the actions necessary to imagine what a fashion museum should preserve and what professional skills it should develop, in order to contribute to the definition of a discipline profoundly related to the contemporary world and commerce. This is still a relevant exhibition in the Italian panorama, which has to come to terms with the striking absence of a museum project comparable to the finest international institutions, even though in recent years some things have changed. At the same time, it was also a chance to reiterate the need to imagine and design a museum space capable of collecting and exhibiting Italian fashion by working on the questions and narratives necessary to understand and relaunch it. "1922-1943: Vent’anni di moda italiana" reminds us today that the insights of Grazietta Butazzi, in her relationship with the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, represent a wealth of ideas and projects on which to reflect, without nostalgia, so triggering a virtuous process to define a precise cultural policy for fashion in Italy. In 2020 "Memos. On Fashion in This Millennium", curated by Maria Luisa Frisa with the exhibition design by Judith Clark at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum reactivates the exhibition by Butazzi, and tries to develop a series of reflections on contemporary fashion, its qualities and its attributes, taking as its starting point Italo Calvino’s "Six Memos for the Next Millennium". The exhibition uses Calvino’s words as devices to reflect on what has changed and what has stayed the same in fashion: Memos sets out to construct a “discourse on method”, or rather a reflection on fashion curating and its ability to deal with the different products of that fashion: not just the objects, but also the images and the words. In this paper these two exhibitions are connected, compared and considered as critical reflections, capable of moving back and forth between the past and the present of fashion. Through the analysis of both these exhibitions (the Butazzi exhibition has been re-discovered for the first time thorough original archival researches), this paper will address the state of Italian fashion studies, and the cultural status of fashion in its relation to the museum and to the practice of fashion curating.