For their Spring/Summer 2024 haute couture collection, the Dutch design duo sent 28 entirely black looks down the runway, each one playing with a deliciously unstable balance: polished but raw, absurd yet serious, chaotic yet exquisitely controlled. It was fashion as performance, with a wink. Everyone also remembers these amazing visuals of Tilda Swinton walking with the pillow dress in the middle of Piccadilly Circus or Tori Amos performing at one of their shows.
One of the collection’s most arresting creations, a deconstructed ballgown of glittering tulle, its exaggerated volume layered over a sleek blush-coloured corset and crinoline, has since stepped off the runway and into the gallery. Until 22 November, it is on view in Milan, in the exhibition space above the city’s legendary concept store, 10 Corso Como.
Called Spectrum, the exhibition brings together 20 haute couture looks from three decades of Viktor&Rolf’s career. Curated by Alessio de’Navasques, professor of fashion archives at Sapienza University of Rome, it is less a conventional retrospective than a conversation between clothes. Arranged in ten pairs, the pieces face one another across the gallery, their similarities and contradictions made deliberately visible. It is a fitting conceit for designers whose work has always been fascinated by duality, and for a partnership in which two names, two personalities and two imaginations have operated as one. In the Viktor&Rolf universe, everything comes in twos.
The designers met in the late 1980s while studying at the art academy in Arnhem, before founding their eponymous house in Paris in 1993. They spent years navigating ready-to-wear, but it was couture, with its freedom from commercial logic and its permission to dream, that ultimately gave their imagination its natural home. Since 2015, they have devoted themselves to haute couture, treating the discipline less as a business than as an intellectual and artistic playground.
“Our work is like a laboratory, a place to experiment and develop ideas,” they have said. And experiment they do: twisting silhouettes, exaggerating proportions, turning the familiar inside out and frequently sending up the conventions of fashion itself.
Perhaps that is why the gallery feels so instinctive a setting for their work. On a catwalk, these clothes have to move; here, they can simply exist. Removed from the body, the choreography and the fleeting drama of a runway show, they begin to reveal their sculptural qualities. A gown becomes an object; a silhouette becomes an idea; a joke acquires a little more gravitas.
At Spectrum, Viktor&Rolf’s clothes are allowed to linger, to be examined, compared and reconsidered. And in the quiet of the gallery, their peculiar magic becomes all the more apparent: fashion that is at once beautiful and irreverent, cerebral and wonderfully frivolous.
–
