1980–2020: Fashion Curating and Cultural Policy in Italy

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 in developing the fashion exhibition, and in defining fashion itself as a discipline. The exhibition 1922–1943: Vent’anni di moda italiana reminds us today that the insights of Butazzi 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 develops 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. These two exhibitions are connected, compared and considered critical reflections, capable of moving back and forth between the past and the present of fashion: this chapter 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.