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Parodi Costume Collection, 276 NE 27th Street, Miami, FL (2026)

08/27/2026

Long before the Bikini became a mainstream symbol of summer fashion and self-expression, it was one of the most controversial garments ever designed; its journey reflects changing attitudes toward women’s bodies, social norms, and ideas of modesty. Although two-piece garments existed for centuries, the modern bikini was not introduced until 1946— when introduced by French designers Jacques Heim and Louis Réard- from there on, it revolutionized fashion and culture.

Parodi Costume Collection’s extensive 1920s swimwear archive reflects an era which preserves elements of modesty, with more progressive streamlined silhouettes that reveal more of the body than in previous decades, effectively delivering greater freedom of movement. This shift accompanied the transformation of “bathing” into swimming as an active sport and leisure pursuit, introducing a new garçonne-inspired silhouette that reshaped the swimsuit.

By the 1930s, tanning became a symbol of luxury, inspiring smaller, open-back styles. WWII brought fabric rationing, requiring a 10% reduction in materials, effectively encouraging smaller silhouettes. However, bikinis remained controversial in the 1950s, and censored in parts of the Mediterranean, before gradually embraced in Europe. PCC’s 1950s swimwear collection highlights this transitional period, when two-piece styles were gaining popularity while the one-piece remained the prevailing social norm.

Social changes in the 1960s transformed the bikini into a staple. Innovation continued with the introduction of the tankini in 1998, offering a two-piece silhouette with greater coverage. PCC’s 1960’s through 2000s swimwear collections trace this ongoing transformation, revealing how changing social attitudes, technologies, and fashion trends transformed the swimsuit—from an object governed by modesty and social convention into a garment associated with freedom, movement, and self-expression.

Discover more stories from the Parodi Costume Collection and explore the history behind these garments on our Substack. Link in bio.

Text by Alexandra Galvez

08/20/2026

Hong Kong, a British colony from the 1800s until 1997, emerged as a major post WWII center of textile production and garment manufacturing. By the 1970s, an estimated one-third of ready-to-wear clothing available in the West was manufactured in this location.

As production expanded, international trade restrictions—including cotton quotas imposed to protect European and American textile industries—encouraged Hong Kong manufacturers to diversify and experiment with alternative materials, including wool blends and knitted textiles. What began as spinning factories developed into increasingly sophisticated manufacturing systems capable of producing complete garments under one roof.

Parodi Costume Collection’s archive captures this period of rapid expansion through its collection of garments produced in British Hong Kong. Among them is a golden sequin blouse with a Zephyr wool shell, made from merino wool known for its ability to absorb aniline dyes and produce vivid colors. Another highlight is a fully knitted party dress, covered in sequins and originally sold at Alexander’s department store in New York.

Ornate knitted tops, dresses, cardigans, and beaded accessories became popular in Western boutiques, often featuring satin linings, metal zippers, elaborate sequins, and highly detailed woven labels.
These labels became more than markers of origin. They communicated quality, provenance, status, and increasingly became tools of fashion marketing. Some manufacturers even positioned labels so they would remain visible when a jacket was casually draped over a chair.

Through these garments, PCC’s collection reveals how trade, manufacturing, materials, and marketing transformed Hong Kong into an essential part of the global fashion system. Discover more stories from the Parodi Costume Collection and explore the history behind these garments on our Substack. Link in bio.

Text by Sofia Sidelnik

08/05/2026

Maria Monaci Gallenga, Italian fashion designer (1880-1944), was the daughter of Ernesto Monaci, a Romance philologist and Dante scholar. With her husband, Pietro Gallenga, a professor at the University of Rome, she developed the metallic printing that became her signature, working from around 1914 in a studio in Florence. With Mariano Fortuny and Henriette Negrin, she stood as the interpreter of the Twentieth century Italian Renaissance in cloth.
PCC’s Gallenga’s cape is a machine for the return of the past. Along its hem, crowned lions confront one another, eagles are displayed, and a band of script offers the form of writing while withholding its sense; the Italian Renaissance recurs as force. This is the territory historian Aby Warburg named the Nachleben der Antike, not the revival of a dead style but its afterlife, the survival of charged forms.
Contemporaries could not name what they saw, describing prints that seemed neither painted nor woven, and her own publicity sold the method as an arcanum, the discovered secret of fixing gold and silver into the cloth. The rhetoric is quasi-alchemical: base pile transmuted to noble metal, impermanence sold as permanence, the knowledge guarded. What the block in fact deposits is metallic powder over an adhesive ground, one tone bleeding into the next, the counterfeit of woven brocade. The patina of age is authored: duration is manufactured. Gallenga printed each cloth after it was cut, placing the pattern by hand: every object is singular, a refusal of the serial logic of the industrial bolt and a claim, in the Arts and Crafts spirit, for the textile as authored work.

Maria Monica Gallenga, Opera Cape rendered in silk Velvet, with proprietary metallic block printing motifs, ca.1925, from the Gallenga archive at Parodi Costume Collection.

Text by Marta Franceschini, PhD. Marta Franceschini

Photography credits to 🕊 and Jess

To learn more about Mara Monaci Gallenga and the Gallenga archive at Parodi Costume Collection read our new Substack article by Marta Franceschini, PhD. In the link in Bio.

07/22/2026

PCC is home to over 150 Oscar de la Renta objects, dating from his partnership with Jane Derby in the late 1960s to the signature Oscar de la Renta label through the 2010s. The garments held within the PCC archive tell the story of the emblematic features that shaped Oscar de la Renta’s evolution into an established international label.
Originally from the Dominican Republic, de la Renta approached fashion as a conduit of memory and a platform to represent art and cultural identity. His craftsmanship was inspired by his native country’s lush landscapes, Spanish Romanticism, and the dramatic atmosphere of Baroque portraiture.
The featured Black Velvet Evening Gown, F/W 84”, presents exaggerated fuchsia satin sleeves that evoke the theatricality of Spanish court portraiture. The piece conjures sculptural volumes and dramatic contrasts reminiscent of Diego Velázquez’s royal paintings, rendered in the vibrant colors of tropical botany. A second featured object, Metallic Floral Lamé, F/W 2004, displays richly textured brocades that echo the luminous surfaces and ornamental depth of Spanish Baroque art. Again, de la Renta’s references to Caribbean colors and landscapes are present in its floral motifs.
The illustrious designer entered his apprenticeship with Cristóbal Balenciaga, who guided him toward precision in silhouette and construction. De la Renta’s background in art history remained a constant throughout his creative process, paying homage to Spain’s visual culture, particularly the works of El Greco, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, whose chiaroscuro, regal compositions, and saturated colors informed the dramatic romanticism in his designs.
As de la Renta’s career progressed, he developed a vocabulary that represented polished American luxury rooted in historical references. This distinguished tailoring is represented in the PCC archive by a structured pink and orange wool coat reminiscent of styles favored by Jacqueline Kennedy. Commercially savvy, his brand expanded into the Miss O line, garnering the attention of actresses such as Sarah J Parker, socialites, and political figures, earning him the moniker “the éminence grise of American fashion”

07/17/2026

“What if beauty exists in imperfection?” In Praise of Ma: Emptiness and the Space Within explores Wabi Sabi featured in Rei Kawakubo’s (CDG) Comme des Garçons’ F/W 1982 Destroy Collection. Garments presented in this collection challenged conventional ideas of beauty, including those embodied by the shawl scarf. To many Western audiences, the distressed holes suggested poverty, destruction, degradation and neglect. However, through the lens of Japanese aesthetics, these voids become an expression of negative space, an invitation to appreciate what is missing as much as what is present.

The distressed textiles throughout this collection featured holes and pulls, Kawakubo’s version of “lace.” Specifically, this oversized shawl scarf, made from boiled wool, was intentionally washed, shrunk, agitated, compressed, distressed, and tattered, with irregular fringe-like tails, and raw edges scattered across its surface. Once the fabric reached this dense state, it is deliberately cut and perforated. Rather than unraveling, the compressed fibers preserved each opening, allowing absence to become a permanent and intentional element of the design.

“Destroy” was not coined by Kawakubo. Such title evolved from the audience. When entering Paris in the early 80s, fashion was dominated by glamour, color, and structured silhouettes. Once Kawakubo arrived, many pages were burnt. The audience was horrified. Critics called it “Hiroshima Chic,” depressing, and anti-feminine.

The visual language of Eastern and Western fashion diverged. While Western fashion magazines of the early 1980s were highly polished and idealized, CDG offered something entirely unfamiliar. From the perspective of photographers Peter Lindbergh and more, Kawakubo’s philosophy was translated into a visual language that Western audiences could begin to understand through raw emotion and intention of texture, capturing energy through unconventional movement and dynamic composition. Neither photographer sought to “correct” Kawakubo’s vision or soften its nature. Instead, they embraced its individuality, allowing the garments to be understood not simply as fashion, but as expressions of a new way of seeing.

06/26/2026

Education is the primary mission at Parodi Costume Collection and Parodi Costume Institute. We like to think of education as predicated through interactivity, and community building around multi-disciplinary engagement. When the programming behind In Praise of Ma was structured, we looked to complement the exhibition’s conceptual thread with the cultural context around the featured Japanese designers. For opening week, PCC/PCI invited a Zen Samurai to perform a collaborative poetic work in and outside the gallery space, to be followed by a collaborative performance with contemporary artist Max Guevara Max Guevara

Sixteenth in his line, Sensei Zen Takai THE ZEN SAMURAI is dedicated to the preservation of the Zen Samurai culture and arts, while sharing his wisdom with contemporary society.

As part of the calligraphy performance, Sensei Zen Takai inhabited the exhibition space, meditating alongside the garments while reflecting on the concept of Ma. This meditative process feeds his work to create “an unrepeatable expression of energy that belongs only to the moment of its creation and the space it will inhabit.” The calligraphy produced, currently displayed in the exhibition gallery, is an equal balance of white space and its kanji, a poetic representation Ma made immediately following his mediation.

Sensei Zen Takai’s work it is on view within the exhibition In Praise of Ma; Emptinees and the Space Within, which is now closed to the general public.

Visits are available by appointment only for private events, educational groups, and large parties until august 2026.

For inquiries and reservations, please contact [email protected].

Text by Sofia Sidelnik 🕊

Sequence by Jesus Pineda Jesus

06/11/2026

In In Praise of Shadows (1933), Junichiro Tanizaki reflects on Japan’s rapid shift toward Western modernity in the early 20th century, and the ways in which this transformation altered traditional sensibilities rooted in Shinto and Buddhist ideology. Electric light replaced shadow, concrete replaced wood, and everyday life increasingly moved toward clarity, efficiency, and exposure. For Tanizaki, this shift risked erasing a more subtle and nuanced way of experiencing space, one grounded in ambiguity, depth, and atmosphere.

Our current exhibition, pays homage to Tanizaki by extending his thesis into space, and consequentially to fashion design. In this tribute a Shoji screen becomes a veil concealing a garment; an object encountered only as shadow before being revealed. This gesture evokes the aesthetic hi (秘), a form of concealment that awakens curiosity through what is withheld. This installation features a CDG S/S 1997 Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body dress, displayed on a full-body mannequin behind the three-panel Shoji screen. Lit from behind, the garment appears initially only as a distorted silhouette. As viewers move around the screen, the dress is gradually revealed, shifting perception from speculation to encounter.

The exhibition starts with Issey Miyake’s 1998 Gunpowder Dress S/S concealed at the entrance, visible only as a shadow before access into the center hall. In the main gallery, another Kawakubo work is positioned within a zen garden, topped by a wool wig, casting shifting and organic shadows that change with movement and light. Across the exhibition, garments are in continual flow, activated through shadow—subtle, intentional.

Together, these installations extend Tanizaki’s philosophy into spatial form. As the exhibition comes to an end, we return to Tanizaki’s reflection that “The quality that we call beauty… must always grow from the realities of life.” In Praise of Ma articulates beauty not as something fixed, staged, manufactured, or revealed all at once, but as phenomena unfolding and discovered, embedded with the flow of real experience, distressed with the passage of time,always emerging through the interplay of shadow and space

06/04/2026

As an incubator for methodologies in fashion curation, PCC and PCI continually engage and incorporate artists into narratives that represent new ways to look and think about fashion history. Inspired by Rei Kawakubo’s runway looks and wig sculptor, Julian dYs’ work, PCC-PCI curatorial looked to recreate a wig from the Spring/Summer 2009 Comme Des Garçons runway. Through community engagement—they recruited Briana Angulo Madueño, a Miami based sculptor and performance artist, to pay tribute to Kawakubo-dYs work while embracing the concepts presented in .

Within the exhibition “In Praise of Ma: Emptiness and the Space Within,” there is an object that simultaneously disrupts the pause and simplicity of the space while embracing the aesthetic of raw textures. Angulo Madueño’s wig is the focal point of a distinct volume rising from a Zen garden, capping a half-mannequin wearing a Comme Des Garçon 2014 Fall/Winter garment.

To learn more about our process and collaboration with Briana in an intimate interview with PCC-PCI’s team, read our new substack article in the link in Bio.

Wig Artist : .m

Text and Photography by : Jessica Hayek

Image Sequence:

Texture of recreated wig by Briana Angulo-Madueño. Image by Jessica Hayek

Texture of recreated wig by Briana Angulo-Madueño. Image by Jessica Hayek

Portrait of Briana Angulo-Madueño. Image by Jessica Hayek

Comme Des Garcons 2014 Fall/Winter Dress within Zen Garden. Image by Jessica Hayek

Polaroids of Briana Angulo-Madueño working on wig cap.

Comme Des Garcons 2014 Fall/Winter Dress within Zen Garden. Image by Jessica Hayek

Comme Des Garcons 2014 Fall/Winter Dress within Zen Garden Polaroid

Briana Angulo-Madueño along with recreated Julian dYs wig. Image by Jessica Hayek

05/08/2026

For the past year, PCC has embarked on the challenge of digitizing its complete collection. This long process ensures accountability of objects, immediacy of information, and allows our team a one-on-one with each object in our collection. The creation of a digital Catalogue Raisonne is essential to the process of archiving, facilitating future direction, research, programming and conservation.

The inventory process is made up of multiple steps that ensure the best care and conservation practices for the objects, while structuring a robust database that facilitates ongoing research and future narratives.

Digitization begins with high definition photography of each object, allocation of an accession number, a formal written description, and any information on producer and provenance. Every piece at PCC is delicately handled, with minimal manipulation, and photographed flat in order to preserve condition. A large scale professional photography lab was developed for this ongoing project, including lighting equipment, camera tethering, and neutral backdrops for every garment, accessory, fabric, and document. This digital photography Lab has two working stations- one dedicated solely to garments and another for accessories and smaller objects. As the images are captured, the PCC conservation team conducts an overall condition report, noting any need for conservation or restoration. Every single notation is uploaded to the catalogue database.

All research and object details go into an extensive spreadsheet whose data is imported into a professional Museum Collections Management System. This system is the brain where all information and research on each object is gathered, facilitating and expediting our search by designer, era, year, material, color, and many more data fields.

Once digitization completed, the process continues. Every garment, accessory or artifact gets packed away in acid free museum conservation materials, and placed in its allocated storage unit/space at the museum. Due to the unpredictable climate and humidity conditions in South Florida, correct packing and storing of historical objects is vital to their continued stability.

05/01/2026

The Parodi Costume Collection, and The Parodi Costume Institute Foundation are pleased to announce the extension of In Praise of Ma: Emptiness and the Space Within, through June 12th, 2026.

Since its opening, the exhibition has welcomed an incredible community of visitors—from a Zen Master Poet, to fashion students and enthusiasts, curators, designers, artists, to the Consul General of Japan and his team, SCAD President Paula Wallace and the entire SCAD FASH Community, our dear friends and professors from MDC MFI and Istituto Marangoni Miami, and many more. The series of visitor Polaroids we present in this post captures moments from these encounters, reflecting the many perspectives that have shaped the life of this show. We are deeply grateful for the continued engagement and support.

In Praise of Ma: Emptiness and the Sapce Within explores a radical shift in fashion initiated by Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Yohji Yamamoto. Grounded in the aesthetic principles of Ma (間), Hi (秘), So (素), and Ha (破), the exhibition presents garments within immersive installations inspired by East Asian culture and Zen Buddhism—inviting a new way of experiencing fashion through space, materiality, and relationship.

This extension offers additional time to visit before we close for the summer.

On view through June 12, 2026 By appointment only at www.parodicostumecollection.com (link in bio)
   
FASH

Parodi Costume Collection

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