A gold mine of inspiration for any tailor or contemporary fashion addicted (to be found in Modena)

In the civic museum of Modena, there is a room that preserves the nineteenth-century layout of a wide selection of prestigious textile collection donated by Count Luigi Alberto Gandini in 1881-1882. It consists of more than 2,500 pieces of clothing fabrics and furnishings. There are velvets, damasks, brocades, satins, taffetas, printed fabrics, embroidery, trimmings, ribbons, braids and fringes. The collection includes art and ornate textile yarns, mostly Italian and European art from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The collection also includes a set of clothes for men and women, of the XVIII-XIX centuries, kept in storage that maybe today would be loved by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare. The room could be a gold mine of inspiration for any tailor or contemporary fashion addicted. And in the late XIX century definitely it certainly captured the attention of the local artist Augustus Valli (Modena 1867-1945), who represented this layout in the opera-document “The hall of fabric in the national exposition in Rome in 1887”, now kept in the same room.

December 16, 2014