<strong>A New Exhibition Proves That Fashion Was Always on Dalí’s Mind</strong>

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

There is a version of Salvador Dalí that gets flattened into caricature — the mustache, the melting clocks, the showmanship. What the current exhibition Dalí: The Great Years, 1929–1939 at Di Donna's Madison Avenue gallery insists on, through more than 30 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, is something more interesting: that fashion was never a side project for Dalí. It was, from the beginning, part of the architecture of his thinking. The show runs through June 13 and is, according to Harper's Bazaar, the most significant presentation of his work in New York since MoMA's 2008 retrospective — and the first to zero in exclusively on the decade that made him.

That decade, 1929 to 1939, was dense with consequence. Dalí formalized his relationship with the Surrealist movement, locked in his visual language, and found in his wife Gala both muse and north star. It was also when he understood, with unusual clarity for a fine artist, that the gallery wall had limits. "His art was meant to be diffused and shown, whether it's through exhibitions, publications, or fashion," says gallerist Emmanuel Di Donna, who spent a decade sourcing works from private collections and institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The show is Di Donna's last at his Upper East Side space before a merger with Pace and dealer David Schrader — and by every measure, he's going out swinging.

The Dress Was Always the Point

Long before the Lobster Dress entered the cultural lexicon, Dalí was embedding garments into his canvases as loaded symbols. In Paysage (Landscape) (1931) — on view at Di Donna — a tiny pink heel holds a glass of milk while fabric drapes suggestively over a branch nearby. The heel's silhouette is a clear predecessor to the upside-down Shoe-Hat he'd later create for Schiaparelli's Winter 1937–38 Haute Couture collection. "The concept of hiding and revealing is extremely important in art and fashion," Di Donna explains. "You can't help but want to know what's behind the fabric." His partnership with Elsa Schiaparelli produced some of the era's most transgressive objects: the Bureau-Drawer Suit, born from a sketch Dalí handed her with precise, almost bureaucratic instructions; the Skeleton Dress, sparked by a drawing he sent with the note, "Dear Elsa, I REALLY love the idea of the bones on the outside…" Then there's the Lobster Dress itself — the crustacean's tail positioned over a white organdy skirt, its sexual symbolism entirely deliberate, made legendary when the Duchess of Windsor wore it in 1937.

His relationship with Coco Chanel, Schiaparelli's great rival, was equally formative. In 1938, stranded in the South of France by the Spanish Civil War, Dalí and Gala spent four months at Chanel's estate La Pausa, where he produced major works and co-designed the costumes for his ballet Bacchanale. When the war forced the production to relocate to New York's Metropolitan Opera House, the costumes — Chanel's real ermine, real jewels, heavily embroidered gloves — were replaced by improvised versions Dalí never approved. He wrote about it bitterly in his 1942 autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. The painting Ballerine en tête de mort (circa 1939), included in the exhibition, gestures toward what that collaboration could have been.

That many of Dalí's Schiaparelli designs are being revisited right now by creative director Daniel Roseberry — simultaneously the subject of the V&A's blockbuster exhibition — is not coincidence so much as confirmation: the most disruptive fashion ideas tend to have a very long half-life.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.