A new exhibition at Milan’s Palazzo Reale explores the Dalí’s love affair with fashion, from his collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1930s to the designers still borrowing from his surreal visual world today.
Italy’s fashion capital is celebrating the enduring and surprisingly underexplored relationship between Salvador Dalí and fashion with a major new exhibition.
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Featuring more than 200 objects, the show at Milan’s Palazzo Reale brings together artworks, garments, photographs and archival material, to explore how the weird and wonderful Spanish artist drew inspiration from fashion and how generations of designers have drawn inspiration from the master of Surrealism.
“The relationship with Dalí and fashion goes right through his work. When you start looking at his work again, it's incredible. You sort of see it everywhere,” says Judith Clark, one of the exhibition’s curators.
"You see it in its kind of fashion's transformational power that, of course, he was so interested in, the art of transformation, the art of shock, the art of disguise, and it goes on, and it goes on and you find that the words associated with his work can be applied to fashion,” she adds.
Dalí’s relationship with fashion dates back to the 1930s, when he collaborated with designers including Elsa Schiaparelli.
“Fashion draws inspiration from Dalí, and it still does today, and this is a particularly interesting aspect highlighted in the exhibition. Yet Dalí himself, by the mid-1930s, was working alongside renowned fashion designers like Elsa Schiaparelli and inevitably drew inspiration from fashion,” says exhibition curator Laura Bartolomé.
One such example of this collaboration is Schiaparelli's famous shoe hat which was inspired by an image of Dalí with a woman's shoe balanced on his head. Dalí then sketched the idea for Schiaparelli, who transformed it into an actual high-heeled shoe-shaped hat.
“His paintings and artworks became fashion, but the reverse was also true: fashion found its way into his paintings and the Surrealist objects of the era,” explains Clark.
The exhibition explores this exchange through Dalí’s fascination with mannequins, clothing and the human body, alongside creations by contemporary designers including Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli, and Maria Grazia Chiuri and Jonathan Anderson for Dior.
The exhibition does not follow a chronological sequence. It takes visitors on a broader journey, bringing artworks and garments into dialogue and revealing the connections between Dalí’s visual universe and fashion, and vice versa.
“On display are Daniel Roseberry’s most recent creations for Schiaparelli, as well as those by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Jonathan Anderson for Dior,” Bartolomé says.
“This was a challenge, but also a unique opportunity to link Dalí not only to the most renowned names in 20th-century fashion history but also to his enduring influence on the creative directors and designers of such celebrated fashion houses today,” she concludes.
“Dalí and Fashion” runs at Milan’s Palazzo Reale until 31 January 2027.
