Grazietta Butazzi Fund

Modern volumes (since 1830): 1318
Manuscript Notebooks: 114
Year of donation: 2014

The Grazietta Butazzi fund is the personal library of the leading fashion scholar who established the field of fashion studies in Italy and published her research findings for five decades. Butazzi’s research cover a wide range of topics, from sixteenth century court dress to traditional costume, from eighteenth century magazines to the Italian fashion industry, with a focus on material culture and object analysis. Her study resources, from academic publications to exhibition catalogues and personal notes, are now kept at the FAR library thanks to the donation of the Butazzi family in 2014.

The Grazietta Butazzi fund consists of 1318 publications on fashion history, history of women’s and men’s accessories, history of textiles and history of women’s emancipation, 114 notebooks, folders of handwritten notes, slides and research documents related to her activity as a scholar.

TGL Fund

Modern volumes (since 1830): 399
Antique volumes: 97
Years of donation: 2010 and 2012

The TGL fund gathers an important group of antique books dedicated to textiles, donated by Alberto Tagliabue, a textile entrepreneur and collector from Como, to ensure the preservation and accessibility of the oldest and rarest part of his book collection.

The TGL Fund became part of FAR through two donations (2010 and 2012), has a total of 496 volumes and includes 4 sixteenth century volumes, 2 volumes of the seventeenth century, about fifty publications of the eighteenth century and about forty nineteenth century volumes until 1830. Among the titles are treatises on silkworm breeding, dyeing and printing, weaving and fashion history, statutes of the guilds, accompanied by more than 250 cries and license letters related to textiles.

The books and documents of the antique collection are preserved in a special, climate-controlled room where readers can research them with the assistance of the library staff.

Seth Siegelaub Library

The book bequest is made up of more than 9000 publications: among them books, volumes and pamphlets of a wide range of interest, most of which are dedicated to textiles. The collection is the most complete collection of textile literature in the world, whose detailed study led to the undertaking of the encyclopedic Bibliographica Textilia Historiae, edited by Siegelaub himself. Siegelaub’s purpose was to make textile studies accessible to art and technology specialists and to underline the cultural and anthropological relevance of textile to the so-called “primitive societies”, in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance up to the Industrial Age. He had a special interest in highlighting all the social and economic meanings associated with it. In addition to this collection, the book bequest includes smaller collections of books concerning Marxist political theory, economic and industrial history, quantum physics, anthropology, philosophy, arts and crafts.

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