Over 200 works tell how Salvador Dalí transformed clothes, jewelry and accessories into extensions of his surrealist universe.
Even before fashion transformed collaborations with artists into a habit, Salvador Dalí had already sensed the possibilities. For him, a dress did not just represent an object intended to cover the body, but a surface onto which to project desires, obsessions and identities.
From 24 September 2026 to 31 January 2027, Palazzo Reale in Milan dedicates the exhibition to this relationship Dalí and Fashionsignificantly inaugurated during Milan Fashion Week. Over 200 works and documents, including paintings, drawings, photographs, clothes, films, jewels and objects, reconstruct a less talked about, but far from marginal, dimension of the Catalan artist’s research. The project, carried out in collaboration with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, brings together materials also coming from the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and from the archives of fashion houses such as Schiaparelli, Chanel, Dior and Rabanne.
THE‘meeting with Elsa Schiaparelli
The most famous chapter of this story naturally remains the one written together with Elsa Schiaparelli. A dialogue arose between the Roman designer and Dalí in the 1930s in which it was almost impossible to establish where art ended and fashion began. Both were attracted by irony, the incongruous and the ability to transform everyday objects into disturbing presences.
From this affinity were born creations that have entered the history of costume, such as the famous one Lobster Dress from 1937, a white evening dress on which a large lobster designed by Dalí stood out. Worn by Wallis Simpson shortly before her wedding to the Duke of Windsor, the dress transformed a symbol with a sensual subtext into an image destined to circulate in magazines and in the collective memory.
Equally iconic was the shoe-shaped hat, created by turning one of the most common accessories in the women’s wardrobe upside down and placing it on the head. A simple yet subversive gesture, perfectly surrealist, capable of removing the object from its usual function to give it a new meaning.
The body as territory of‘imagination
In Dalí’s universe the body never appears as a stable form. It stretches, fragments, hides and transforms continuously. Fashion offered a privileged tool for exploring different possibilities: the dress could deform the silhouette, the jewel could become an anatomical part and the mannequin take on the disturbing appearance of a being suspended between human and artificial.
The Milanese exhibition investigates precisely this corporeal dimension, relating the artist’s works to clothes and accessories. Fashion emerges as a space in which the body can be reinvented and identity constructed through what one chooses to show. A surprisingly contemporary reflection, anticipating a system in which the personal image has become language, representation and spectacle.
Dalí as Dalí character
The first body transformed by the artist was, after all, his own. The pointed moustache, theatrical poses, cape, cane and deliberately eccentric clothing made up an immediately recognizable visual identity. Dalí understood with exceptional anticipation that the artist could become a work himself and that fame was not necessarily a distraction from creation, but could be an integral part of it.
The itinerary also pays attention to the wardrobe of Gala, wife, muse and decisive figure in the construction of Dalin’s universe. His clothes, presented for the first time in Italy, tell the story of fashion as a tool for relationships and self-representation. Gala was not simply the passive subject of the artist’s gaze, but actively participated in the definition of that image of a sophisticated, enigmatic and deliberately out of the ordinary couple.
From magazines to shop windows
Dalí did not limit himself to collaborating with stylists. He designed fabrics, worked on advertising campaigns, designed shop windows and participated in the creation of features and covers for Vogue. He posed in front of the camera and even took on the role of guest editor, moving effortlessly between art, publishing and commercial promotion.
Precisely this ability to cross apparently distant languages makes his work still relevant. Long before the age of viral images, Dalí understood the power of visual provocation and the need to create something that was not only beautiful, but impossible to forget.
Curated by Laura Bartolomé and fashion historian Judith Clark, with contributions from Lucia Moni and Bea Crespo, Dalí and Fashion it does not limit itself to recounting a curious parenthesis in the artist’s career. Rather, it shows how clothing represented a real area of research for him; a place where surrealism could leave the canvas, meet the body and enter everyday life.
