“Dalí and Fashion” is an exhibition that explores the Surrealist genius through his style. From September 24 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the exhibition presents art and fashion from a new perspective (with Vogue Italia as media partner). Co-curator Judith Clark shares her perspective on the convergence between Surrealism and fashion as art forms through the lens of the new exhibition.
I vividly remember my visit to the Florence Biennale exhibition “Il Tempo e la Moda” thirty years ago. The main exhibition, originally staged at Forte Belvedere and moved to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York the following spring, traced a century of relationships, collaborations, and affinities between fashion and art.
The exhibition opened with Giacomo Balla’s famous vest—an emblem of Futurism, a partner to fashion that was as essential as it was problematic—and moved almost immediately to Surrealism, its most dreamlike counterpart. The impression was that the exhibition sought to explore the possibility of clarifying—or perhaps even dissolving—the traditionally established hierarchy between these two disciplines.
When fashion is placed in relation to artistic movements—rather than being evaluated based on presumed criteria of artistic merit—it becomes easier to identify affinities and points of convergence. Surrealism, for example, has been explicitly featured in numerous exhibitions dedicated to fashion this year, beginning with “Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis,” the exhibition curated by Valerie Steele at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the first exhibition to reconstruct the cultural history of the relationship between fashion and psychoanalysis.
In the accompanying volume, Steele writes: “Lacan is fundamental to the study of fashion because he moved the relationship between fashion, Surrealism, and psychoanalysis beyond the Freudian horizon of dreamwork, sexual symbolism, and exhibitionism, paving the way for new reflections on self-alienation, body image, fragmentation, and aggression.”
That exhibition was followed by “Art X Fashion,” also at the FIT Museum, and curated by Elizabeth Way; the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art,” curated by Sonnet Stanfill and Rosalind McKever; and the Metropolitan Museum’s “Costume Art,” where curator Andrew Bolton observed, “Rather than privileging the visual dimension of fashion, often to the detriment of its corporeal component, Costume Art centers its materiality and the inseparable connection between the body and the clothes we wear.” Through artifacts spanning 5,000 years, the exhibition constructs an extraordinary history of fashion and the body—material, carnal, vulnerable, seductive, devotional, fragmented—and its transpositions into various expressive languages. The body is thus placed at the very center of the museum, a presence that has always been implicit, but never so clearly rendered.
Dalí and His “Infinite Work”
At the end of September, coinciding with Milan Fashion Week, Palazzo Reale will inaugurate “Dalí and Fashion.” The exhibition—co-curated by me with Laura Bartolomé, under the scientific direction of Montse Aguer of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Catalonia, home to the important research center housed in the Dalí Museum—ideally concludes this series of exhibitions, each of which has offered a different reading of Dalí in the light of contemporary sensibilities. The artist’s position at the intersection of these perspectives testifies to his almost unique position in the cultural landscape and, at the same time, demonstrates the infinite number of possible interpretations of his work.
The Palazzo Reale exhibition unfolds along a single thread: chronologically. By exploring its boundaries, it reveals how many of Bolton's dear themes resurface, as well as those explored by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Internal research provided an even broader picture of the artist’s relationship with the history of fashion, demonstrating how Surrealism, despite being the aspect most immediately associated with his name, actually represents only a part of his involvement in this universe.
The exhibition opens with Dalí's own reflections, drawn from the book The Secret Life of Dalí, and the gradual process through which the artist constructed his image. Initially modeled on his moods, it later crystallized into the look we all know: the upturned mustache, the cowboy shirt, the cape, the cane.
The exhibition explores Dalí's involvement in the complex mechanisms of fashion creation and promotion: from textile design to advertising campaigns, from shop windows to Vogue cover shoots, to the artist’s role as guest editor or dynamic model before the camera.
The exhibition also explores his relationship with four emblematic figures from the fashion world. It traces his close relationship with Gabrielle Chanel—from the collaboration on the costumes for the ballet Bacchanale to their stay at La Pausa, the designer’s villa on the French Riviera; his partnership with Christian Dior on the costumes for the famous Beistegui Ball in Venice in 1951; his friendship with Paco Rabanne; and finally, his collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli, which produced some of the most iconic dresses and accessories in the history of twentieth-century fashion.
What the Exhibition Reveals
The exhibition also features the personal wardrobe of Salvador and Gala Dalí. Preserved in Púbol, in the medieval castle transformed by the artist into a home for his wife and muse, these garments are now exhibited in Italy for the first time.
The pieces testify to the couple’s extraordinary stylistic coherence over time, as well as precious material references for the garments depicted in some of the paintings on display. The paintings on display depict bodies in constant transformation: double portraits, contorted and tormented figures, and, finally, the physical body is represented in the form of an extraordinary collection of jewelry.
The collection includes the Ruby Lips brooch, the hybrid pieces Leaf Veined Hands I & II, the watch-brooch The Eye of Time, and the Corset Ring. Like fragments separated from the body, these jewels are designed to be worn—just like the famous Shoe Hat created with Schiaparelli—on the “wrong side” of the body, an unmistakable sign that we are in the territory of Surrealism.
The exhibition design is deliberately restrained. It doesn’t attempt to imitate the theatricality of Dalí’s universe, but rather allows the works to bring color to spaces conceived in a monochromatic palette: the eggshell cream so dear to Dalí, the Mediterranean white, the museum gray.
The decorative design, however, stems from a practice developed in my studio, that of “sampling”: a principle in which one simply intervenes on a few fragments of the surfaces to evoke the effect of the entire decorative apparatus. The visitor is thus presented with a decorative proposal, a hypothesis, an experiment: only a portion of the base is covered in mosaic, while the rest remains deliberately unfinished.
Why waste material? It’s a way of understanding the new museology as a design and proactive practice, rather than as a simple scenographic construction.
The substitute body of the mannequin continues to represent a privileged area of collaboration for those who curate fashion exhibitions. On this occasion, the dialogue is renewed with Bonaveri, flanked by Angelo Seminara’s extraordinary hair creations.
The mannequins’ raw canvas coverings do not attempt to simulate human skin, but rather celebrate the need for conservation that constitutes the founding principle of museum practice. Dalí and fashion—there is no definitive verdict on the relationship between the two—however, the proliferation of exhibitions dedicated to fashion over the past year invites us to reconsider the criteria by which we judge it and to ask whether it can exist as a conceptual act, regardless of the methods of its production.
Dalí deeply loved those production processes: he embraced them, imitated them, exploited them, and ultimately transformed them into art.