MEMOS. On Fashion in this Millennium
Exhibition at Museo Poldi Pezzoli Milano, IT
21.02. – 04.05.2020

written by Paola Re, member of the advisory council of ETN

MEMOS is an exhibition made by the National Chamber of Italian Fashion, in collaboration with the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and ICE Agency and the Municipality of Milan. With the participation of Tendercapital.

The show opened on February 21 and will run until May 4 2020.

The project, in the form of an exhibition and catalog, aims to trigger a series of reflections on contemporary fashion, its qualities and its attributes, activating them from those American lessons of Italo Calvino, which the author held in the autumn of 1985 at the Harvard University, Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures lectures. Calvin died suddenly in September of the same year, but his wife decided to publish the written traces of it. The title given by the writer was Six Reminders for the Next Millennium. Thus Memos, incisive and broad word, is the title of the exhibition.

The exhibition is both an open work and a scientific and poetic attitude, an exercise "of research and design, of discovery and innovation."

The museum was also the site of a series of fashion exhibitions, such as 1922-1943: Twenty years of Italian fashion (1980) curated by Grazietta Butazzi, who looked at fashion as a field of historical, critical and curatorial investigation: thanks to the precious collaboration of the Municipality of Milan - Historical Collections, Costume Fashion Image of Palazzo Morando, some clothes presented in 1980 on the occasion of the exhibition curated by Butazzi will be on display. Also from these considerations the choice was born to reactivate the link between the spaces of the house-museum and fashion, through a critical reflection in the form of an exhibition.

Museo Poldi Pezzoli
Via A. Manzoni 12
IT-20121 Milano
https://museopoldipezzoli.it/en/