Dressing up like you were in 2045

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From a fashion point of view I found the exhibition “Dalí Dalí med Francesco Vezzoli” at Stockholm's Moderna Museet rather interesting.

In the first room of the exhibition space it is possible to admire the "Scatalogical Object Functioning Symbolically - Gala's Shoe” (1931, 1974) that shows a sort of festishistic need Dalí had to turn garments and accessories into works of art.

The piece is made up of a strange assemblage that includes a woman's shoe, white marble, photographs, clay, a milk glass containing wax, a brush without bristles, sugar cubes, spoons, a matchbox, a wooden scraper, hair and a gibbet.

Dalí described the piece as: “A woman’s shoe, inside of which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the centre of a soft paste in the colour of excrement. The mechanism consists of the dipping in the milk of a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar, and consequently the image of the shoe, may be observed.”

The second room of the Moderna Museet exhibition features a few jewels such as the ruby lip brooch with pearl teeth designed in 1949 and an entire display dedicated to Dalí’s work with Elsa Schiaparelli, that includes a sketch for the iconic shoe hat (1937), Schiaparelli’s silk crepe Tear Dress (1938), a white evening dress characterised by trompe l’oeil rips and tears, worn with a long veil with real tears, and the silk organza Lobster Dress (1937), both on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What I wasn't expecting to see at this exhibition was the futuristic “Costume for the year 2045”, a silk jersey aqua dress developed with Christian Dior in 1949-50, accessorised with a velvet crutch, that, rather than being made to sustain a crippled body, looks like a bizarre stick of the sort carried by a Biblical leader.

This surrealist ensemble is actually part of the collection of the Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and I had actually never seen it before in any other museums or exhibitions.

The costume features an amazing amount of fabric draped around the torso and the hips and a pair of prosthetic breasts, surrounded by metallic decorations and three faces, jutting around the pelvic area.

Undoubtedly, this is the sort of dress you could write an essay about and, immediately after I saw it, I started thinking about the debates on misogynistic fashion designs à la Alexander McQueen or creations that turn women into futuristic Amazon-like creatures. I wish I knew what Dalí had in mind when he thought about this costume.

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