From today, May 20th, a new exhibition entitled “Women in Balance” opens at the Ferragamo Museum in Florence. Using the example of Wanda Ferragamo, wife of Salvatore Ferragamo and founder of the luxury company of the same name, the exhibition chronicles the social change that women experienced on their way to emancipation between the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The exhibition, which is on view for a year, pays homage to Wanda Miletti Ferragamo, who ran the Salvatore Ferragamo brand with a keen head and a steady hand from 1960 (after the death of her husband) until her own death in 2018.
“Wanda’s story is one of a woman who masterfully combined the woman’s traditional role of caring for her home, husband and children with her professional responsibilities and responsibilities to the company,” the statement said Exhibition.
“Since Wanda Ferragamo rarely spoke about herself and was reluctant to take credit for the success of the Ferragamo brand over the past six decades, this exhibition aims to show who Wanda really was while, as she would have liked, the stories of others Tell the story of women who combined personal success with devotion to their families between the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Accordingly, the exhibition is divided into different sections: the first section deals specifically with Wanda Ferragamo, while other sections present the life of Italian women in the period 1955-1965 through the themes of “Family”, “Women’s Professions”, “Artist’s Studios”, ” Domestic environment, consumption and advertising”, “Female role models in the cinema”, “Focus on young women” and “Fashion as an expression of female identity”.
The exhibition is based on the theory that history develops through the actions of a multitude of creative, productive people and not as the result of an absolute principle. This is how new lifestyles, consumption models and gender and work relationships emerge.
All these factors came together in post-war Italy (as in Germany) with its economic miracle, triggering profound cultural and social changes that need to be viewed in a long-term perspective to appreciate their full impact. The exhibition makes a contribution to this.
