The musealization of dress. When museums need garments

Fashion museums, exhibitions, and, more generally, musealisation of dress fits into a multicultural context in which the concept of culture and heritage is increasingly broad and multifaceted. The very concept of heritage has also been updated and continues to be a topic for reflection. The broadening of its meaning until including the recognition of intangible heritage as an asset to be protected, also opens discussions about museums and how they operate. Fashion in particular embodies this broader understanding of culture. The intimate relationship with the body has made fashion a very powerful tool of communication and visual culture: the double function of fashion indeed mirrors the double function of heritage, to create both a sense of self and belonging. Although fashionable dress was not considered worthy of musealization activities before the Second World War, clothing has always been a subject of interest for places of culture. Three main areas of interest have been identified in the exhibition of the dress: about the historical testimony that its very nature of changing with time entails, and the relative meanings it is invested with according to the era; about the construction that it creates (or allows to create) of the “other”, in terms of anthropological differences; about the intrinsic value that fashion brings as a commodity linked to industry and image. These three fields of investigation are reflected in three types of museums: the historical museum, the ethnographic museum and the museum of fashion and costume. Through both a phase of research and a phase of direct investigation, it will be explored how the ways of display fashion have evolved — from the first Universal Expositions to the present day — through methodologies of exposition, research and storytelling. The field research includes the testimonies of curators, conservators and professionals in the sector who, behind the scenes, will give an overview of the musealisation of clothing nowadays. The museums chosen represent the three types listed: the National Museum of Italian Risorgimento (thanks to the conservator Monika Szemberg) for the historical one; the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography - MAET (thanks to the conservator Gianluigi Mangiapane) for the ethnographical one; Palazzo Madama's textile collections (thanks to the conservator Paola Ruffino) for the fashion one. All the museums are in the city of Turin, a historic fashion landmark, providing an overview of the territory and of its past and present heritage. A direct survey has also been added about the exhibition “Galtrucco. Textile Fashion Architecture”, located in Milan at Palazzo Morando — a fashion and costume museum — from 13th of December 2024 to 15th of June 2025. Thanks to the curator Margherita Rosina, it was also possible to investigate the process of creating a temporary fashion collection, closely linked to the Piedmontese territory thanks to the loans of important pieces on display.