Dressing for a Venetian Palazzo: The Rituals of Italy's Grand Society Evenings

An evening in a Venetian palazzo imposes its own conditions on dress. Guests arrive by water, step from a boat onto wet stone, climb to a reception floor and spend the evening in rooms built for a different century. The city's grandest occasions of the twentieth century were shaped by these facts as much as by fashion.

The house and its floors

Venetian palaces were designed around the piano nobile, the principal floor above the water entrance, where the largest rooms opened onto the canal. A guest's evening began at the water gate, continued up a staircase and ended in halls whose decoration, often frescoed or hung with silk, was older than anything the guests wore. Evening dress in Venice was therefore seen against a historic interior, in mixed light, and at close quarters on stairs and landings.

Fortuny's Venetian answer

The most distinctively Venetian evening garment of the century came from a workshop in the city itself. Around 1907 Henriette Negrin and her husband Mariano Fortuny created the Delphos, a finely pleated silk dress modelled on the Greek chiton and named after the bronze Charioteer of Delphi. Fortuny patented the pleating method in 1909 in his own name, but his annotations on the application credit Negrin, and the Victoria and Albert Museum now considers her largely or wholly responsible for the design.

The Delphos was a column of silk that moved with the body, worn without a corset. It suited the conditions of a Venetian evening: it needed no structure to hold its shape, and its surface caught low light. The couple lived and worked in Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, which after Fortuny's death in 1949 passed to the city of Venice and has been open as the Museo Fortuny since 1975. In 1919 Fortuny also founded a textile factory on the Giudecca, which still produces printed fabrics.

The Volpi house and the Lido

The social calendar that made Venice a fashion stage in the mid-century was shaped in part by one family. Giuseppe Volpi bought his palazzo in 1917 and was the initiator of the first Venice film exhibition, held from 6 to 21 August 1932 on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. The festival created a summer season of evening screenings and receptions, attended by an international audience in evening dress.

After Volpi's death in 1947 his widow, Lily Volpi, became one of the city's best-known hostesses. Sotheby's quotes Countess Cristiana Brandolini recalling that "she always had interesting guests, delicious food and beautiful flowers", and describing the balls at the palazzo as "unbelievably beautiful". Photographic archives record a ball given by the Volpis in 1960.

Costume as ritual

Venice's tradition of costume gave its grandest evenings another form. At Carlos de Beistegui's ball at Palazzo Labia on 3 September 1951, discussed elsewhere in this Journal, guests came in eighteenth-century and oriental costume designed in several cases by Paris couture houses. The couturier Jacques Fath came as the Sun King in gold brocade, a costume so stiff that he is said to have stood in his gondola for the whole journey. The anecdote records a real constraint: in Venice, dress has to survive the journey by water.

What survives

Many of the garments worn on these evenings were made to be seen once. What survives in collections tends to be the robust and the practical: pleated silks that could be twisted and stored, shawls and wraps for the boat, and costumes that were kept as souvenirs.