The Fabulous '60s in the Maremma. The mark of Ico Parisi

"Terre degli Uffizi" brings back on the catwalk the Maremma's artistic and cultural Renaissance of the 1960s with fashion from the Museum of Costume and Fashion of Pitti Palace. The mark of Ico Parisi’ on display at the Polo Culturale delle Clarisse from 17 June to 3 September. The exhibition is promoted by the Fondazione CR Firenze and the Gallerie degli Uffizi in the context of their respective Piccoli Grandi Musei and Uffizi Diffusi projects.

The Gallerie degli Uffizi (the museum cluster of which the Museo della Moda e del Costume di Palazzo Pitti is a part) is contributing to the exhibition with four garments from its prestigious collection, designed by stylists who made their mark on the fashions of the 1960s. The exhibits include two cocktail outfits, one by Federico Forquet and the other by Mila Schön, and two bathing costumes by Dianora Marandino: mounted on four dummies, they are built into a layout inspired by two tourist complexes of the time and fleshed out with photographs, drawings and objects of design from the period. The exhibition sets out to conjure up the vibrant tourist atmosphere of the Maremma in the 1960s, highlighting the dialogue between artistic and cultural expression and between design and the clientele who frequented the area.

The exhibition is set in a context comprising three symbolic venues – two hotels and a church – testifying to the prolific nature of tourism in the Maremma in the ‘60s.

The first venue is the Hotel Lorena, strategically positioned on the Via Aurelia. Opened on 26 November 1960, it shut down for good in the 2000s. Architect Ico Parisi furnished and decorated the hotel in accordance with the very latest in Italian design, the area in which he was accustomed to working. The second is the Hotel Corte dei Butteri, situated close to the sea. The hotel was designed and built entirely by Parisi, following the draining of a marsh that had previously covered the area. The hotel’s guests, of a more reserved temperament than the clientele of the Lorena, displayed a sensitivity hinting at a greater awareness of nature. The textures and fabrics of Dianora Marandino’s bathing costumes convey a close bond with the natural surroundings in their choice of cotton and their colourful hand-painted decorations echoing different aspects of the landscape. The third setting explored in the exhibition is the church of Santa Maria dell'Osa, a part of the Hotel Corte dei Butteri complex and it, too, testifying to the designer’s effort to show respect and consideration for the building’s natural surroundings.

The two cocktail dresses loaned by the Uffizi’s Museo della Moda e del Costume perfectly embody the hotel’s sophisticated, dynamic clientele. The coat designed by Federico Fourquet in 1968, with its clearly defined flare, has five circles on the side, one inside the other, in neutral colours such as beige, cream and brown. The matching dress, also dated 1968, echoes the light colour of the first circle in the coat and has a black circle on its right side. The interaction between the forms and colours of the coat and the minidress reveal a taste for the geometrical that was typical of the period. The second outfit, a woman’s two-piece suit designed by Mila Schön in c. 1965, is in pure blue. The vertical lines of the edges of the jacket and the dress dialogue with the curving lines of the neckline, buttons and lower part of the pockets.

Dianora Marandino’s two bathing costumes, hand-signed, reveal a similar interest in the dialogue between fashion and the surrounding environment. The natural cotton fabric and the hand-painted geometrical forms hark back to elements of the natural coastal and rural landscape.