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“She sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor, one that informs her polymathic practice, which extends to publications, performance, writing, film, and beyond,” Michelle Kuo, a chief curator at large at MoMA who worked with Wales Bonner on the exhibition, told ARTnews.

For the exhibition, on view until April 7, Wales Bonner has taken over part of MoMA’s first-floor galleries, showcasing a collection of 50 artworks with a focus on Black aesthetic and cultural practices inspired by the sounds, styles, and experiences of the African diaspora.

Each of the displays epitomizes the title of the show which Wales Bonner has said “evoke multiple histories, inspire contemplation, and conjure new connections between people and Places.” Works featured in the show come from an array of artists, including Terry Adkins, Betye Saar, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, and even the likes of Agnes Martin and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

A recurring theme in the exhibition is a certain musicality, best exemplified by Adkin’s large-scale installation Last Trumpet (1995). Its four eye-catching, elegantly shaped trumpets stand tall at the far side of the first gallery and immediately draw you toward them. These 18-foot-long horns are functional musical instruments, part of Adkin’s aim to connect the worlds of music, sculpture, and performance, like Wales Bonner’s intention in bridging fashion with other creative disciplines.

Literature is just one point of reference for Wales Bonner. Creating worlds for characters to inhabit through different fabric textures, sounds, rhythm, and movement. She has said that fashion is an immediate form of communication to an audience where she can explore deep ideas. Wales Bonner’s practice is also informed by her extensive archival research, which lends each project a holistic approach that aims to create worlds for posterity. One such work is a hard-to-miss wooden carving by Moustapha Dimé titled Lady with a Long Neck (1992) that combines found materials (both organic and industrial) collected from the streets of Dakar. In its raw form, the sculpture bridges Islamic and Sufi spirituality with artistic handiwork.

On view for the first time is David Hammons’s makeshift scroll Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China), from 1978, which is a reference to Duke Ellington’s 1971 album The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse. In using the form of an East Asian scroll that has at its center a cluster of hair collected from barbershop floors, the work highlights the connection between Afro-Pacific and Afro-Atlantic culture.

“Many works in the show make use of found materials—things that have a history, that have had other lives,” Kuo said. “Moustapha Dimé’s Lady with a Long Neck features a reclaimed butcher’s block at its center, with a rhythmic array of notches that are actually the marks made by cooks who had used the wooden block in Dakar.”

She continued, “There’s a beautiful rhythm, too, in the carefully patterned tufts of hair woven into David Hammons’s Afro-Asian Eclipse, which the artist collected from the floors of barber shops. You can see the trace of hands, of meditative motions, of a different kind of musicality in each piece.”

But, Wales Bonner sees curating art exhibitions as an extension of her work as a fashion designer. Her first exhibition “A Time for New Dreams,” which borrowed its title from a collection by Nigerian British poet Ben Okri, was staged at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2019. Its themes focused on mysticism, magical realism, and ritual within Black cultural and aesthetic practices and looked at the ideas of shrines across the Black Atlantic.

Showcasing sculpture, film, photography, literature, music, poetry, performances, and more, the multisensory installation show brought together a group of artists including Rashid Johnson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Eric N. Mack, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Liz Johnson Artur, who has since become a frequent collaborator. In the show’s catalogue, Okri says of Wales Bonner’s research-focused practice, “We ought to use time like emperors of the mind. Do magic things that the future surprised will find.”

Claude Adjil, the exhibition’s curator, said that in early conversations with Wales Bonner, she mentioned Robert Farris Thompson’s landmark 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy, which looks at five African civilizations (Kongo, Yoruba, Mande, Cross River, and Ejagham) and how they have impacted the social, aesthetic and metaphysical traditions and creative output of Black people across the African diaspora. “We were looking at different books but also artists that have inspired her,” Adjil said.

But beyond just presenting a static exhibition with works on view, Wales Bonner thought about how to create a show that could be activated and could come alive through a performance program, including an evening with British musician and songwriter Sampha, whom Wales Bonner has previously collaborated with for a zine Shy Light (2017) and the soundtrack to her Autumn/Winter 2017 show. “Grace holds space for these different collaborations,” Adjil said.

Recurring themes in her practice, both as a designer and as a curator,  are the intergenerational artistic production of Black people across the diaspora. Just as Okri’s poetry collection lent its title to her Serpentine show, Ishmael Reed’s 1972 seminal book Mumbo Jumbo gave her Autumn/Winter 2019 collection its title,  and her research for one project often leads to the next, as Okri led her to Reed. Set in 1920s New York, Mumbo Jumbo follows a series of narratives surrounding jazz music, white supremacy, and voodoo in a collage-style approach. In a statement accompanying the collection, Wales Bonner said, “The collection considers the role of writers as oracles, connecting to a rich and magical lineage, serving as the custodians of ancestral wisdom passed down and reinterpreted.”

For each of Wales Bonner’s boundary-pushing projects, there is a different themebut, according to Adjil, “they’re building blocks in what she has been looking at across over the years.” Such was the case with Johnson Artur, whom Wales Bonner met during a studio visit during the research phase of “A Time for New Dreams.” “We went to her studio and there was a lot of rich and ongoing dialogue, talking about what had inspired her and what she was thinking about for her design collection,” Adjil recalled.

Johnson Artur added, “I have been working on my ongoing art project Black Balloon Archive for the last 30 years and have never compromised on my idea to create a space where the people I photograph can see themselves through their own self. I like to believe this was the reason Grace approached me for the first time for her curated show at the Serpentine.”

Those conversations ultimately laid the groundwork for what would become Wales Bonner’s “Mumbo Jumbo” collection, which featured an assortment of characters, ranging from a West African spiritual healer to an artist shaman. Also included in the cast were intellectuals from Howard University, who dressed in the classic American college wardrobe consisting of wide leg jeans and trousers, oxford and polo shirts, and jazz-era tuxedos.

“I’ve been thinking about black intellectualism as a form of spirituality,” Wales Bonner told AnOther Magazine in an interview at the time. “It’s referencing very recognisable clothing – American college – but trying to imbue that with a sense of magic that originates from African spirituality; imbuing something that’s very classic and American and with a sense of language and culture that comes from somewhere else.”

Wales Bonner and Johnson Artur would collaborate again for the designer’s Autumn/Winter 2020 collection Lovers Rock, which Johnson Artur photographed. The collection was a celebration of the reggae genre of the same name that emerged from the British Afro-Caribbean underground parties of the 1970s. Serving as a love letter to Caribbean music and fashion, the partnering with Johnson Artur was symbiotic, as she has documented the African diaspora for over three decades from underground clubbing scenes to street life, from church celebrations to everyday moments.

 “Art has no boundaries—I believe Grace shares this vision too,” Johnson Artur said. “Collaborating is an essential part of my practice and each one has been a highlight in my career.”

Alongside the MoMA exhibition, there is also a mixtape on Spotify where Wales Bonner takes us on a journey of soundscapes through the exhibition, and an artist’s book, titled Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit, created and edited by her as a “an archive of soulful expression,” featuring photographs, texts, poems, and more by authors and artists including Reed, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Langston Hughes, and Quincy Troupe.

“Grace Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style—not only as surface but as

structure,” Kuo said. “Every detail of her polymathic designs, publications, exhibitions, and films is related to long histories, deep archives, and cultural identities across the diasporic world.”

Every year on the first Monday of May, the museum hosts the art and couture ball to support its costume department, which holds around 33,000 objects across seven centuries of fashion history. Guests are invited to the Met Gala by invitation and a single ticket can cost up to $50,000. Though the price may seem high, there are expected to be roughly 400 guests in attendance tonight.

This year’s theme centers around the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who perhaps most notably served as the creative designer for the French fashion house Chanel. The theme is decided on by the Costume Institute’s chief curator Andrew Bolton before it is presented to the Met’s director and president.

For “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”, roughly 150 original looks will be on view next to Lagerfeld’s sketches and video interviews.

“At its heart the exhibition will look at the evolution of Karl’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional garments,” said Bolton in an interview with Vogue. “Karl never tired of telling me that fashion did not belong in a museum…He would say, ‘Fashion is not art—fashion belongs on the street, on women’s bodies, on men’s bodies.’”

Previous themes have included “Camp” (based on Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay) in 2019 and “Heavenly Bodies” (which borrowed from the Vatican collection) in 2018, among others.

British screenwriter and actress Michaela Coel, Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, Swiss tennis player Roger Federer, and Albanian pop singer and songwriter Dua Lipa are this year’s co-chairs of the event, alongside Vogue‘s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Those wishing to watch the red carpet event can tune in on E!, beginning at 6 p.m. EST.

Heart has been designing with two issues in mind, climate change and “the urgent need to champion women as leaders,” as Chloé has put it in brand messaging. “This is already accounted for. So how do we do this in our design context?” Hearst told Vogue. “I have to find a muse, and that is Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance painter.”

The brand’s Instagram is full of references to Gentileschi, introducing the new collection with quotations from the artist, like, “A woman’s name raises doubt until her work is seen” or “I will show your lordship what a woman can do” alongside videos featuring her paintings.

The influence of the muse appears subtly. Whereas Paco Rabanne’s recent Fall 2023 collection included textiles printed with Salvador Dalí’s paintings, Chloé refrained from recreating Gentileschi’s work. Rather, Hearst seems to have taken loose inspiration from Renaissance era modes of dressing, invoking Gentileschi as a symbol of womanhood that transcends eras.

Born in 1593 in Rome, Italy, Gentileschi managed to become an artist despite the obstacles facing her as a woman in a male-dominated craft. Her rape at 17 years old, and the subsequent trial, defined her life, as onlookers and critics defined her as a curiosity. Meanwhile, her work would be strongly influenced by that violation. Paintings like Judith Slaying Holofernes (1615) and Jael and Sisera (1620) both depict strong, capable women killing unsuspecting men.

The Chloé collection is devoid of that violence. The collection toggles between two modes: cosmopolitan looks featuring models swaddled in leather and shearling and then the Renaissance-inspired designs. Taking cues from the oft-used finestrella sleeves of that period —that is, ballooning sleeves with slits cut out to show off fabric underneath— Hearst designed dresses with long, flowing sleeves pinned at the outer shoulder whose cuts showed off skin instead of textile.

Other dresses show off Heart’s various attempts to modernize the sumptuous sleeve: one look had skintight sleeves that morphed into elongated bells at the elbow, another flowing sleeve erupted from a tight black chest panel at the mid-forearm. There was a lot of wide, almost off-the shoulder necklines, often found in Gentileschi’s depictions of women. And while there were no corsets in the collection, the designs often featured aspects of the corset, such as the low, v-shaped waistline popular in Renaissance corset designs.

Gentileschi’s influence on the collection doesn’t go beyond her invocation as a woman who overcame the biases of her time, a mascot more than a muse. Despite how thin the connection to the artist is, the collection is a beautiful and sophisticated experiment in modernizing elements of Renaissance fashion.

If they educated more people about this pivotal artist along the way, well, what’s the harm in that?

Inside, uniformed men held silver platters of champagne amidst a sea of black dots covering yellow walls, mirrors, and reflective spheres. A giant, standing LV sign, encrusted with more chromatic spheres, stood glinting and flashing.

These simple forms speak immediately to Kusama’s body of work. The mirrors are a nod to her viral “Infinity Rooms,” the first of which was debuted in 1965. Later ones have shown at museums and galleries across the globe, and are perhaps responsible for spawning the recent rush of “immersive experience” exhibitions. The chromatic balls, meanwhile, reference Narcissus Garden, which premiered at the 1966 Venice Biennale. As in the “Infinity Rooms” or Narcissus Garden, the dots crowd spaces, covering canvases, rooms, people, and fabric in red, yellow, black, and white.

The smudged and warped spheres presented at the Louis Vuitton store, however, bely a seeming lack of care to the collaboration. Almost every item, stamped in Kusama’s irregular dot and LV’s perfect monogram, appears made of polyester, like a polyester-and-wool zip-up fleece for men that sheds on itself and the surrounding items.

There is a lot of clothing that doesn’t bear Kusama’s mark at all, such as a black pleather-like overcoat styled over a ribbed white tee, fitted at the collar with a chain that is shrink-wrapped in white plastic. There’s a black polyester suit that—gasp!—includes some polka-dot lining. These items seem to be intentionally uninspired, meant to invite the coward to permit themselves a Kusama charm necklace or a statement bag. And the bags at least seem well constructed. They come in a variety of forms, from mini-luggage style, black and studded with spheres, to a classically modular one that is the only reference to Louis Vuitton’s vastly more successful collaboration with Kusama in 2012.

Louis Vuitton’s 2012 collaboration was perfectly timed, due in part to some manipulations. Led by Marc Jacobs at the time, LV was the sponsor of a Kusama retrospective at the Whitney. But beyond that obvious tie-in, there was sensitivity to the zeitgeist. It was the heyday of the quirky girl, who wore flats and blunt bangs. The style of that millennial moment could best be described as lovingly and knowingly cheap, complete with a reverent love of Minnie Mouse, bows rendered in hard plastic, deep blacks and lipstick reds, and, yes, lots of dots. In short, a perfect time to launch a collaboration with the art world’s version of the quirky girl, Kusama.

Yet, despite that era’s love of cheapness, the 2012 collaboration was anything but. It exalted in the cookie-cutter, shiny surfaces beloved of that moment—the pin-up heels, jelly flats, and Peter Pan collars—and manifested them at their highest, most perfect iteration.

This collaboration is missing the 2012 one’s commitment to the bit. This is partly due to the sheer size of the collection, which numbers over 400 items, both for men and women. The womenswear, which takes up the left side of the store, is comprised of pajama suits, bags, T-shirts, a silver leather jacket, necklaces, scarves, and even a surfboard. They hang off racks or the same, repeated female mannequin, a white woman with a slightly wavy bob. The menswear, meanwhile, is a mash-up of street wear, backpacks, sneakers, a nice pair of grey-tone, dotted cargo pants and a matching puffer jacket, as well as thick varsity jackets, suits, and collared shirts. For whatever reason, unlike the female ones, the male mannequins are unique and represent Black and Asian individuals; all are beautifully rendered.

Kusama, at 93 years old, has been playing with fashion for a long time. In 1968, she debuted the Kusama Fashion Company and began working with major department stores like Bloomingdale’s. She then started Nude Fashion Company, whose products were considerably more avant-garde, like the “Party Dress,” which could fit up to 25 people inside of it. In Japan, her stamp is found on both high- and low-end items.

There is a reflexive flinch that often comes with seeing the fashion world absorb art and artists, as if fashion is by definition commercial and art is radical and pure. But, as with anything, there are simply better or worse ways of doing things. This time, it happens to be worse.

“They’ve helped myself to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?” the famous graffiti artist wrote to his 11.5 million followers in a post Friday on the social media platform.

The photo Banksy posted was of the window display of a Guess store on Regent Street in London showcasing several items from a capsule collection with the word “Brandalised” and featuring several Banksy graffiti images.

The artworks referenced include “Flower Thrower”, “Queen Ziggy”, the “Living the Dream” Mickey billboard in Los Angeles, the “Thug for Life Bunny”, and “Flying Balloon Girl”.

The clothing company’s official announcement for the capsule collection used the word “inspired” and said the items were produced in partnership with Brandalised, an urban graffiti license “whose mission is to offer Banksy fans affordable graffiti collectibles.” The clothing and accessories are priced between €40 to €270 ($41 to $278 USD).

“The graffiti of Bansky has had a phenomenal influence that resonates throughout popular culture,” Guess Chief Creative Officer Paul Marciano said in the press release. “This new capsule collection with Brandalised is a way for fashion to show its gratitude.”

After Banksy posted the message on Instagram, the BBC reported that Guess closed the store, put security outside, and covered the window display.

ARTnews reached out to Guess for comment, but did not receive a response at press time.

It was a major coup for the designer and deejay, then just 37 years old. The son of middle-class Ghanaian immigrants, Abloh’s entrée into high fashion six years earlier had been tarred by accusations of plagiarism and knee-jerk rejections from critics and commentators. But he would soon become a household name, his Off-White label jumping 31 places to become third on the 2017 Lyst Index of the world’s hottest brands (it became number one on the list the following year).

At the same time, Abloh was making good on his promise to prop open the door behind him, mentoring numerous young designers of color through his Post-Modern scholarship fund, the NikeLab Chicago Re-Creation Center, the educational online series Free Game, and more. He invited some 1,500 students to his very first runway show for Louis Vuitton, an event that also attracted Kanye “Ye” West, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, and fashion’s best and brightest. “I often refer to my career as a bit of a Trojan horse: It exists to traverse two spaces and allows other people to partake in it,” Abloh told WSJ. Magazine in 2021.

Just a few months after that interview, Abloh was dead, felled by a rare heart cancer that he hid from the public. The fashion world hasn’t been the same since, and it still struggles to categorize Abloh’s unboxable creative output. Abloh himself rejected the “street wear” moniker that often trailed his work, contesting it as a racist dismissal of his legitimacy. “The systems recognize me as different: They label the work as street wear, they say I’m not a designer, they say it’s not art—the list goes on,” Abloh told the hosts of the Ethical Fashion podcast in 2021. “I need to tell my own narrative . . . I’m not waiting for a narrative to come back about whether my work is valuable or not.”

So far, public opinion has been on Abloh’s side. Figures of Speech,an exhibition of his work cutting across music, fashion, architecture, and design, has toured five art museums so far and has been received with worshipful admiration at each. The Brooklyn Museum, the first to host the exhibit since Abloh’s death, recently rolled out commemorative items unique to its iteration of the exhibit, ongoing through January. After months of anticipation, Nike also dropped the limited-edition lime-green Air Force 1 Lows designed by Abloh and worn by exhibit security earlier this month, just as it did for the Lows worn in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (sky blue with red accents) and in 2021 at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (a vibrant marigold). Unsurprisingly, they’re already sold out.

Speculation still smolders about the Abloh-less future of Off-White. Ibrahim “Ib” Kamara, Abloh’s stylist, was named art and image director several months after Abloh’s death; the first Off-White collection created under his leadership hits runways in early 2023. Louis Vuitton continues to salute the fallen designer, but as of this writing, the house has not named Abloh’s successor. Instead, those who best enshrine Abloh’s legacy will likely be the same enthusiasts he happily chatted up via Instagram DMs and mentored, rather than the slow-moving institutions he couldn’t help but feel he sneaked into.

In addition to founding his own brands, including Off-White, Abloh collaborated with countless others—Equinox, Gore-Tex, Jimmy Choo, Kith, Sunglass Hut, and Timberland, to name a few. Listed below are his six most essential collaborations.

“A Matter of Style”, a pop-up fashion museum opening September 9, is an exploration of New York’s sartorial legacy, framed through the vast photo archives of Fairchild Media Group, whose portfolio includes the stalwart style-spotter Women’s Wear Daily. (WWD is owned by Penske Media Corporation, the same parent company as ARTnews.) The museum, on view at AG Studios in Manhattan, will present exclusive illustrations, vintage fashion, immersive experiences, and photography in tandem with New York Fashion Week.

Fairchild, founded by John Fairchild in 1910, owns one of the most significant fashion photography archives in media. It includes candids of quintessential New York personalities alongside images of ordinary people whose daily dramas unfold outside the spotlight.

There’s Jackie Kennedy, slipping out of her regular lunch spot La Grenouille. Downtown luminaries like Andy Warhol and Patti Smith appeared in its pages. Epochs in American history unfold in front of the photographer’s lens: the stiff skirts synonymous with the nuclear family; the beaded, fringed height of the hippies; and the dapper power uniform of the Black Panther era. “Style is a language and reflects history just like any other sort of visual medium,” writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis once told WWD.

“A Matter of Style” comes during a fruitful time for fashion exhibitions. Possibly owing to the enduring popularity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, clothing has entered the art institution—not always a seamless process—where its historical weight is given consideration. Right now, a survey of the work of late artist and designer Virgil Abloh is on at the Brooklyn Museum. And the Costume Institute’s last big outing also centered American fashion, though with a greater emphasis on its relations to European haute couture.

The Fairchild Museum’s New York–specific focus is a nice deviation. It should offer some insight into how the personal and the political intersect on our garments.

To learn more about the show, ARTnews chatted via phone with its curator, the visual culture historian, archivist, and design educator Tonya Blazio-Licorish. A condensed version of the conversation follows below.

Can you talk a little about your role as an archivist?

My work here revolves around the archival content for all Fairchild brands. I came to PMC as a visual culture historian. And so, I use my background in fashion history to bring a storytelling element to how I look at the Fairchild archive, which is just an incredible amount of information. Really, this is a well-deserved moment for Fairchild, who has been there to capture what, exactly, fashion has been saying over the course of decades. It celebrates its 112th anniversary this year. It captures the history of fashion, which spans designers, runways, celebrities, music, art—no part of our culture is untouched. This show will specifically focus on the story of fashion in New York City.

And how did you settle on a story to tell about New York?

I’ve focused on the people, places, and things that made it a global fashion city, but also made it unlike any other fashion city. This is about creating a context: what was happening in that moment, disguised in what New Yorkers were wearing. I mean, just think about denim—consider the effect of that photo of James Dean in jeans and a white tee. You are instantly transported to that moment in time.

And New York—America, really—evolved differently from the European capitals; its fashions were more democratic. Denim and other fashions reflected America’s drive to form its own cultural zeitgeist. Think about the youthquake of the ’60s, the Black Panther uniforms of ’70s. Every generation was trying to say something.

How do you think WWD set itself apart from similar fashion publications?

The exhibition focuses on how WWD has in continuum captured fashion as the essence of culture and gives the viewer access to its intimate connection with not just the fashion industry but all the interconnected spaces that it inspires and vice versa. John Fairchild saw fashion as a conversation, WWD’s advances could predict the trajectory of the next trends as they spoke to the zeitgeist. From its early beginnings, WWD has captured fashion in conversation with everyday lived in moments, in its street style photo essays “They Are Wearing.” There was also “The Ladies Who Lunch” another trademark of the daily journal — dedicated to the fashionable ongoings of the social scene and the socialites of the day. In a way, this was all an early form of social media.

As a visual historian, what do you think of the “is fashion art” debate?

The collaboration marks the second time Louis Vuitton has worked with the critically-acclaimed and internet-beloved artist, known for her repetitive use of dots, balls, and reflective materials.

“As a celebration of the Maison’s relationship with the artist and to mark the 10-year anniversary of the first collaboration, a handful of leather goods were premiered during Artistic Director of Women’s Collections Nicolas Ghesquière’s Cruise 2023 fashion show at the Salk Institute in San Diego,” reads a press release from Louis Vuitton.

In 2012, when the brand was helmed by designer Marc Jacobs, Kusama’s signature dots adorned scarves, dresses, shoes and were overlaid over Louis Vuitton’s iconic monogram on bags. The resulting effect evoked ’60’s mod.

The new collection, which was shown on the catwalks at the Salk Institute in San Diego Monday, has a quite different effect. Dots of yellow, green, white, blue, and red are seemingly painted on the bags, as if attached, albeit somewhat methodically, by a naughty child. One of Louis Vuitton black leather bags is dotted with protruding silver balls in a direct reference to one of Kusama’s most popular works, Narcissus Garden (1966) in which mirrored spheres are arranged on the ground or even in shallow bodies of water.

Only a small sample of the Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton collaboration was on view yesterday. The full collection, which the release describes as “transversal,” is due to be released in January next year.

Valentino didn’t skip showing in fashion’s capital—they debuted another couture collection in Paris’s last week week—but showing in Venice is central to creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli’s vision of the label’s post-pandemic identity. Art is essential to Valentino’s brand and process. Venice has long been a contemporary art hub, home to a series of rotating biennials that take place each year at the Arsenale and its neighboring pavilions.

Piccioli’s process reveals his distinctive approach to art-and-fashion collaborations. The designer enlisted a group of artists to produce works that responded to the label’s aesthetic. “I didn’t want to do the couture version of the museum T-shirt,” Piccioli told Vogue. He did want to create a hub of creativity and inspiration. Piccioli choose 16 young artists from a list of 60 names scouted by writer and curator Gianluigi Ricuperati. Piccioli and Ricuperati had begun working together several years ago in anticipation of this new form of collaboration. Jamie Nares, Patricia Treib, Francis Offman, Benni Bosetto, Andrea Respino, Wu Rui, and Alessandro Teoldi were among the 16 artists chosen at the beginning of the pandemic.

Valentino Fall/Winter 2021 couture collection

“It wasn’t a typical fashion collaboration,” Ricuperati said. “Because it was peer-to-peer.” Instead of a cut-and-paste approach to artist-designer collaborations that have been typical of the fashion industry’s past, Piccioli exchanged sketches and proposals from each of the artists remotely throughout the pandemic. He responded, in turn, by reinterpreting the works into his designs.

“We must imagine Valentino Des Ateliers as a concert for two distinct worlds,” said Ricuperati in a statement issued by Valentino, “painting and Haute Couture, contemporary art and clothing art.” Picciloi and Ricuperati put an emphasis on painting, viewing it as the natural counterpart to couture, fashion’s most individualized and labor-intensive clothing. Couture is also the area where a designer’s most abstract visions are often realized.

This process was best illustrated in the collaboration between Jamie Nares and the couture house. Nares’s Blues in Red (2004) was one of the paintings most visible in the collection. Nares paints with a distinctive wide brushstroke that appears to hover in space. Piccioli enlisted his Rome-based workshop to make custom screens to hand-print the brushstrokes onto the dress’s fabric. As is typical of couture dress-making, the process took a grueling 700 hours.

Piccioli and the house’s atelier used those screens to create a roomy oxblood red and white gown, the shape of which invokes Papal robes. (Perhaps the look is a nod to Vatican history and the label’s Roman origins.) So striking was the dress that Piccioli chose to present it as the final 84th look, ending a procession of billowing chartreuse and fuchsia gowns, alongside feathered headpieces that appeared to float as models walked passed.

Among the show’s other standout pieces was a sequined light blue dress inspired by Wu Rui’s photographs Handkerchief (2021) and A Piece of China (2021). The dress was presented beneath a chiffon cape printed with images from the Milan-based artist’s works. Italian artist Alessandro Teoldi’s 2019 painting of silhouetted figures served as the pattern for another sweeping red gown; and Benni Bosetto painted abstract figures directly on the sewn pattern of a cashmere ensemble.

Valentino Fall/Winter 2021 couture collection

The clothes were presented underneath the arches of the Gaggiandre, a 16th-century shipyard. Designed by Renaissance architect Jacopo Sansovino, it was once among the city’s largest production centers, when Venice was at the center of a seafaring empire. The show’s runway wrapped around the shipyard’s dock creating a hovering effect above the canal water. Adding to the unreality of the presentation, the audience was asked to wear white head-to-toe to blend into the background better.

Now, Valentino has leveraged the antique site as a place of rebirth. “It was the only place in the world in which to present such a collection,” Piccioli said in a statement, “a context where nothing can be added or subtracted.” The bare setting was crucial to the collaboration.

Venice is currently host to the Architecture Biennale, for which architects around the globe installed large-scale projects focused on designs for a post-Covid future. Nearby, there is a sprawling exhibition of video installations by Bruce Nauman at the Palazzo Grassi Punta della Dogana. Many of the city’s squares are still nearly vacant as tourist foot traffic has reached an all-time low.

Valentino is not the only label looking to art world collaborations to showcase its new wares. Saint Laurent’s creative director, Anthony Vacarello, has also tapped artists like Vanessa Beecroft and Helmut Lang for collaborative projects in recent years. In Venice on the previous night, Saint Laurent debuted a large-scale commissioned installation by multimedia artist Doug Aitken on the near-empty island of La Certosa, home only to brick ruins from the post-war era. Overlooking the Venetian lagoon, the colossal mirrored structure served as the stage for models debuting the brand’s latest menswear line.

Over the course of the pandemic, Piccioli has embraced the idea of freedom, aiming to cross boundaries of couture beyond sartorial conventions around gender, social archetypes, and functionality that typically dictate the fashion industry’s output. “Fashion is linked to the body and to movement,” the house said in a statement. “Art, however, is completely free from constraint.”