For their couture show of Spring Summer 2024, the Dutch designers Viktor&Rolf sent out 28 all-black looks that were both polished and raw, silly and serious, chaotic and controlled. One of them, a deconstructed glittering tulle ballgown layered over a sleek, blush-coloured corset and crinoline, will be on show in Milan until 22 November in the gallery space above the city’s famed concept store, 10 Corso Como.
The exhibition, called Spectrum, and brought together by Alessio de’Navasques, professor of fashion archives at the Sapienza University of Rome, will include 20 haute couture outfits from three decades of the designers’ career. Shown as ten pairs, the exhibition will create dialogue between the pieces, reflecting the duality that underpins both their own partnership and their design ideology. In Viktor&Rolf World, everything comes in twos.
The couple met in the late 1980s, at college in Arnhem, and established their own fashion house in Paris in 1993. Though they created ready-to-wear for a number of years, their flamboyance and experimentalism has always been better suited to haute couture, to which they dedicated themselves from 2015. “Our work is like a laboratory, a place to experiment and develop ideas,” they say. Though their central focus is always fashion—its codes, structures and aesthetics—there’s no denying that a gallery is as well, or even better, suited to their conceptual, sculptural works as a catwalk.