There is something in the air this spring when it comes to exhibiting fashion. In London, the V&A hosts the UK’s first major retrospective of the work of Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, framed in large part around her connection and complicity with the avant-garde art scene of the mid-20th century. The first Monday in May will see the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s ‘Costume Art’, with a gala event themed ‘Fashion is Art’. And at Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, a new exhibition, curated by Eloy Martínez de la Pera Celada and very much in this same spirit, opened its doors last week.
In the Portuguese capital, the simply titled ‘Art & Fashion’, takes some of the most notable items in the museum’s collection, acquired by its namesake during his lifetime, as its starting point, and positions them alongside garments ranging from a peplumed coat from 1740 to an embroidered wedding dress from Sarah Burton’s debut at Givenchy for the A/W 2025 season. The exhibition’s conceit is simple, too: that the boundaries between the disciplines of fashion design and fine art are, essentially, moot.
‘Art & Fashion’ at Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
The show opens with an introduction to Calouste Gulbenkian himself, a dandyish Armenian oil tycoon with a penchant for bespoke Savile Row tailoring, and, metaphorically at least, very deep pockets. His insatiable, voracious appetite for beautiful things was founded upon Ruskian principles: of beauty as a moral imperative, something that purifies, that makes us better. Whether or not this vast collection of beautiful objects – some 6,000 pieces in total – was enough to purify a man whose wealth was built on the exploitation of Middle Eastern petroleum reserves is debatable, but what is without question is the quality of his taste. ‘Art & Fashion’ is almost singular in its scope, for the reason that at its fingertips is an unparalleled array of works, from the ancient world to the Impressionists. The opportunity to position a Lacroix A/W 1992 look next to a Rembrandt oil painting is one that very few institutions can easily capitalise on, and it is instances like this that make the exhibition particularly impressive.
Grouped largely by the artworks’ regional provenance, the exhibition route is conceived to honour the way the museum usually displays its permanent collection, which is temporarily closed to the public while renovation works to the purpose-built Brutalist building are underway. An ebony funerary statue from the Thebes region of Egypt, depicting a man dressed in a shendyt and sculpted sometime between 2000 and 1990 BCE, takes its place next to a Yohji Yamamoto menswear look of a poplin shirt and pleated wool taffeta wrap skirt. Three 14th-century plates painted in blue and white find their echo in an exquisitely embroidered, sleeveless Dries Van Noten gown. Carpaccio’s Holy Family with Donors (1505) hangs behind pieces from Charles Frederick Worth, Mariano Fortuny, and Balenciaga, which mirror the clothes worn by the painting’s four central figures.
These are some of the more literal examples of art’s influence on fashion, of which there are many, and it is these that lend the show its most joyful moments. It’s impossible not to smile at the cute comparison between the splayed body of a hunted swan in a 1708 still life by Jan Weenix, and Manuel Pertegaz’s voluminous 1960 goose feather dress. Or the Virgin and child scene reimagined in oils by Renaissance painter Jan Gossaert, and then again in hand-painted silk by Alexander McQueen for Givenchy. But its best and most thought-provoking moments are where the comparisons move beyond aesthetic to something more conceptual – most particularly in the pairing of Yves Saint Laurent’s 1968 Saharienne jacket with various works by the French Impressionists. Both defiantly transgressive. Both radically changed the course of history in their respective disciplines.
The exhibition makes a persuasive argument for treating fashion and art as equals, but it does so in part by purposefully neglecting to establish a rulebook for what it means by fashion, and what it means by art. One is dealt with in very narrow terms, the other in very broad. Fashion is represented almost wholly by luxury ready-to-wear or haute couture – Guo Pei, Romeo Gigli, Versace, Madame Grès, Alaïa – with only one small nod to what we might call ‘popular fashion’, in the form of a shawl with traditional Nisa embroidery. Conversely, one of the first large-scale pieces on show from the permanent collection is, fittingly, a wardrobe, an incredible wardrobe – one attributed to André-Charles Boulle circa 1700, and rich with tortoiseshell and bronze marquetry – but a wardrobe nonetheless. The fashion is fashion of the highest form, the art is not just fine art, but applied and decorative too – functional pieces, craftwork, textiles, furniture, a picnic set, a hat-stand. By this logic, all beauty is art.
So bold a statement is worthy of Ruskin himself. The exhibition ends with another of his disciples: Edward Burne-Jones, whose The Mirror of Venus (1875) is mirrored again by a series of draping neo-classical gowns hung on mannequins in a frieze-like composition. It’s a dazzling finale, and a convincing case for the defence, in a debate that will doubtless continue well past this 2026 slew of exhibitions on the matter are over.
‘Art & Fashion’ at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum runs until 21 June 2026.