Museo del Tessuto Italiano

Established in Prato (Tuscany) in May 2003, in the former factory of textile manufacturers Cimatoria Campolmi Leopoldo. The building is a fine example of late nineteenth-century architecture now completely restored, and the only such building still standing inside the fourth-century city walls. The exhibition occupies one of the halls of the factory, which was purchased by Prato Municipality for more than 20 million euros, and which will become, when it is completely opened in 2007, a very important cultural centre and library. The museum was originally founded in 1975 at the Istituto Tecnico Statale Tullio Buzzi, which had in turn been set up in 1897 to provide training for the wool trade. Prato has been chosen as a fitting home for the first specialised textile museum because of the rich textile tradition in Tuscany, which has produced and exported wool and materials world-wide since medieval times. Today in Prato, 40,000 people work for around 8,000 businesses and exporters specializing in yarn, fabrics and their related machinery. The museum has a collection of more than 6,000 pieces, dating from the early Christian era until today. It is among the first 10 museums of its kind in Europe, containing rare pieces such as fragments of textiles from the pre-Columbian epoch, or the red canvas used for the shirts of Garibaldi’s soldiers. One section is dedicated to innovative and high-tech materials. As well as a large collection of textiles, the displays include historical dress, machinery used in the production of textiles, and the materials used in the dying and design of fabrics. For the opening of the museum, as well as the permanent displays, an exhibition was held entitled “Prato veste il cinema: il mito attraverso I costumi della collezione Tirelli.” This included a selection of more than 40 outfits and costumes created for films, most of which had been made out of fabrics produced in Prato, such as the lace and silk worn by Winona Ryder in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Sean Connery’s habit in Jean-Jacques Arnaud’s The Name of the Rose, and the costumes of Fellini’s Canova and Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini.
&Quad;2001, May. A themed exhibition was held in the old seat of the museum, illustrating the roots of contemporary design. The show consisted of 12 examples of women’s outfits from the 1960s, all from the private collection of Osanna Vannucci, accompanied by a selection of fabric samples. These run through the most significant stages of this revolutionary period in the history of fashion: from Mary Quant’s miniskirt, to the concept of the “total look,” to textile innovations including synthetic and artificial fibres which were experimented for the first time by great tailors such as Valentino, Balestra, Ken Scott, and Emilio Pucci.