Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
I would be surprised if we don’t continue to see more and more fashion at museums. It’s the dominant medium of today, and Anna Wintour’s big bash has gone a long way in linking these two worlds. Still, it’s funny to think how all this started with Alexander McQueen’s 2011 blockbuster retrospective, “Savage Beauty,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art because that one didn’t particularly feel like fashion. As Holland Cotter wrote in his review, the show would probably allow future researchers to take him out of that world “and place him firmly in the cultural milieu he shared with artists like Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney and Leigh Bowery…”
Now at the Grand Palais we have “From the Heart to the Hand: Dolce&Gabbana,” a new show celebrating the work of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, now both in their 60s. Their wearable love letters to Italian culture are celebrated across 200 outfits, over 300 handmade accessories and more than 130 pieces of furniture and antiques. If the McQueen show could shock you with a single item—say, a hat that is bafflingly kinky—this exhibition embraces D&G’s deep theatricality by building appropriate sets in which their baroque outfits might chew the scenery.
SEE ALSO: Our Favorite Looks From the Inaugural Le Grand Dîner du Louvre
Most of the clothes come from their Alta Moda and Alta Sartoria collections, with Sartoria focusing on flamboyant menswear. Since 2012, Moda has offered one-of-a-kind, made-to-measure, no-holds-barred pieces—costumes, really. Even when the colors are relatively muted, they’re no less outrageous. Take the Fall/Winter 2021-2022 Alta Moda fashion show presented in Venice. These paid tribute to the Byzantine mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica and looked quite a lot like the Met’s recent show on Sienese painting, dripping with melodrama and gold. Even their room of all-white outfits takes inspiration from the baroque stucco of the 17th and 18th Centuries in Sicily, with the end result looking like a mix of flowers, angels and John Carpenter’s version of the Thing.
But of course D&G is better known for rainbows. If we were to make like Cotter and ask about their artistic influences, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli and Titian probably come most to mind, though there’s something of El Greco about them, too—perhaps in the way they want their clothes to seem in motion even when they’re standing still. It feels a bit wrong to name a painter from two countries other than Italy, however, as this show seems oriented towards driving home the idea that this brand is not merely Italian but Italy itself, all of it at once. Look no further than their outfits for the opera, bedecked in crystals of Venetian glass, or their classic Sacred Heart motif. If we have to live in a time of overbearing nationalism, it’s a definite bonus when your national identity looks this good.
“From the Heart to the Hand: Dolce&Gabbana” is on view at the Grand Palais through March 31.