One afternoon in 1950, an elegant woman wearing a Fabiani suit and a Fath hat was stopped on Park Avenue in New York by an older lady who asked her point blank, ‘Where did you get this dress? Who designed it?’ The lady was Diana Vreeland, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and the younger woman was Irene Brin, who would soon become the magazine’s Rome correspondent.

This exhibition celebrates through photographs, documents, books and magazines, art works, clothes and accessories, one of the most intelligent and refined Italian women of the 20th century. Irene Brin (1911-1969) was the first Italian fashion editor, and she played a key role as a cultural mediator, bringing Italian style abroad. She was also a commentator and adviser on manners and customs in a country that was slowly rising after the war and fascism, and – together with her husband Gaspero del Corso – one of the keenest Roman gallerists of the post-war, two of her discoveries being Alberto Burri and Renzo Vespignani.

The exhibition, aptly held at the Accademia di Costume e Moda that holds part of Brin’s archive, is curated by Claudia Palma and produced in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Irene Brin Association of Sasso di Bordighera, both of which lent documents and memorabilia.

Jacopo Benci

Times of opening: Mon-Sat 10.00-17.00; Sun closed

Photo: Irene Brin and Gaspero del Corso in the Galleria L’Obelisco, Rome, 1946 by Leslie Gill, courtesy GNAM