One day, Valentino Garavani appeared at the studio of the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, on the outskirts of Lisbon, and told her that she made haute couture. “No, I make sculpture,” Vasconcelos replied. “No, no, you make haute couture,” the designer insisted, impressed by the level of detail of the traditional crochet with which she had composed her colossal figures. At that moment, already dusk for the Italian, a artistic connection was born that now culminates in Venus—with a V for Valentino and Vasconcelos—, the exhibition with which the MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon celebrates its tenth anniversary and, in passing, honors one of the house’s artists and the star of haute couture.
“That first conversation felt like a transfer of responsibility. He transformed women, elevated them, and now it was a matter of doing the same for him,” Vasconcelos tells us as she finalizes the details of the opening. “I would know how to pay tribute to him.” And she does know it: in the following rooms, a divine presence pours forth, an essentially aesthetic conception of the world that asks how it is possible to have brought the basic need to dress into art. For Valentino achieves it and Vasconcelos exalted it like no one had done before.
Or, as it had been only partially done before, because this exhibition is the expansion of the one inaugurated last January at the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation in Rome, just a few days after the designer’s death: “He invited me to his archives and followed the works closely; it’s a pity that he didn’t reach the opening, because he would have loved it,” laments Vasconcelos. “But, in a way, among the haute couture elite gathered there, with the Fendis and the Ferrettis, he was present and he was the protagonist.”
Here, in Lisbon, he remains so. Joana Vasconcelos plays with the spaces of this groundbreaking architecture —which she knows so well after seven exhibitions in the ten years of MAAT’s existence— to configure a space halfway between a runway and a museum. The effect is clear: to display haute couture as sculpture.
