ROME.- There was a moment in the 20th century when Rome was no longer only the Eternal City. It became a movie set, a runway, a laboratory of style, and one of the places where the myth of Made in Italy took shape before the eyes of the world.
That moment is at the heart of Moda in Luce 1955-1975. Roma fra glamour e innovazione industriale, a major photographic, multimedia, and fashion exhibition opening at the Musei Capitolini, Centrale Montemartini, where it will remain on view from June 26 through November 15, 2026.
Presented by Archivio Luce Cinecittà with the Ministry of Culture, promoted by Roma Capitale and the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, and curated by Fabiana Giacomotti, the exhibition brings together 150 historic photographs, rare films, archival materials, fabrics, documents, and 30 original garments, many of them never before exhibited.
The show continues the story begun with Moda in Luce 1925-1955. Alle origini del Made in Italy, presented at Palazzo Pitti in Florence. But the Rome chapter moves into a different phase: the years when Italian fashion moved from promise to international consecration, and when the city became a stage where cinema, couture, industry, celebrity, and modern life met.
In the decades after the Second World War, Italy was changing rapidly. New roads, new professions, new technologies, and new social habits were reshaping everyday life. Rome stood at the center of that transformation. Cinecittà, already legendary after the rise of Italian Neorealism, became known as “Hollywood on the Tiber,” attracting American studios, international stars, and the mythology of the screen.
Fashion followed a parallel path. Italian ateliers, dressmakers, and designers, deeply aware of Parisian couture but rooted in Italian craftsmanship and art, began to speak a new language. Their work traveled across Europe, America, Russia, and Japan. From Rome, Italian fashion showed that haute couture could leave the salon and enter the modern world: onto Via Veneto, into cinema, and into the imagination of a generation.
The exhibition draws largely on the Archivio storico Luce, one of the great visual archives of Italian and European 20th-century history. Its photographs and newsreels capture the moment when Rome became a reference point for fashion and spectacle, preserving images of runway shows, ateliers, interviews, reportage, jet-set gatherings, craftsmanship, and glamour.
Among the designers and fashion houses represented are Valentino Garavani, Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi, Federico Forquet, Sorelle Fontana, Giovanna Caracciolo-Carosa, Valentina Visconti, Irene Galitzine, Fernanda Gattinoni, Roberto Capucci, Maria Antonelli, Patrick de Barentzen, Renato Balestra, André Laug, Emilio Federico Schuberth, Gabriellasport, Antonio De Luca, Angelo Litrico, Domenico and Agostino Caraceni, Pino Lancetti, and Laura Biagiotti.
The garments come from major fashion archives, historic costume houses, museums, and private collections, including Mantero Seta, Taroni, the Ermenegildo Zegna group, Farani, the Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi, the CIAC-Centro internazionale Arti e Costume in Venice, and the important private collection of Massimo Cantini Parrini, the internationally renowned costume designer and multiple Academy Award nominee.
Designed by architect Dario Dalla Lana in the spirit and colors of an elegant Roman atelier of the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition also includes a library-like final room with textile samples, rare books, magazines, invitations, memorabilia, and an album amicorum that belonged to Angelo Litrico, containing drawings and dedications by leading tailors and artists of the era, from Emilio Pucci to Valentino and Novella Parigini.
The show is also populated by the faces and bodies that helped turn fashion into global myth: Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Lucia Bosè, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Elsa Martinelli, Anita Ekberg, Anna Magnani, Ingrid Bergman, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Rod Steiger.
Several moments read like founding scenes of modern Italian glamour. Valentino’s first runway show in 1959 appears as a key episode. The 1949 wedding of Tyrone Power and Linda Christian, with the bride in Sorelle Fontana and the groom in Caraceni, is presented as an early signal of the “dolce vita” era. Fernanda Gattinoni’s empire-line designs for War and Peace and Audrey Hepburn, the Roman premiere of Fellini’s La dolce vita, Anita Ekberg’s unforgettable Trevi Fountain scene, and Galitzine’s palazzo pajamas all become part of a larger story about how fashion and cinema shaped one another.
The exhibition also looks beyond glamour. One section is devoted to Snia-Viscosa and the Roman history of synthetic textiles, opening a window onto factories, chemistry, women workers, and the social and political dimensions of industrial production. Another section focuses on Palma Bucarelli, the influential critic and director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, who embodied a powerful connection between fashion, art, elegance, and intellectual rigor.
Among the works on view are Valentino’s Fiesta dress from his first 1959 show, including the model that introduced the red that would become one of his signatures; Galitzine’s 1963 palazzo pajama, famously associated with Claudia Cardinale in Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther; a futuristic coated-fabric Galitzine suit presented in Capri in 1967; a 1953 cocktail dress by Sorelle Fontana; André Laug’s iconic short dress from 1968; an evening dress by Capucci from the same year; Karl Lagerfeld’s 1973 coat and skirt ensemble for Fendi; Schuberth’s painted evening dress from 1952; and a dramatic 1975 creation by Lancetti.
Together, these pieces show fashion not only as ornament or luxury, but as a form of movement, aspiration, and modern identity. Italian couture softened rigid lines, freed the body, and gave new form to women and men entering a changing world. It remained elevated, but no longer unreachable. Through cinema, photography, and public imagination, it became something that everyone could dream about.
The exhibition is aimed not only at those who remember the period, but also at younger generations interested in contemporary fashion, design, image-making, and the professions of style. Its central argument is clear: the Roman season of fashion between 1955 and 1975 is not a closed chapter. It continues to influence how fashion is imagined, produced, and seen today.
Moda in Luce 1955-1975. Roma fra glamour e innovazione industriale is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, edited by Fabiana Giacomotti. The 236-page volume includes images from the exhibition, photographs of the garments by Leonardo Salvini, essays, archival material, a glossary of key figures in Archivio Luce, a bibliography, and documentary material that positions the book as an independent resource on a crucial period in Italian fashion and cultural history.
Moda in Luce 1955-1975. Roma fra glamour e innovazione industriale is on view from June 26 to November 15, 2026, at Musei Capitolini, Centrale Montemartini, Via Ostiense 106, Rome. The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with last admission one hour before closing, and is closed on Mondays.
