“The Only True Protest Is Beauty”—Inside the Inaugural Presentation at Dries Van Noten’s New Fondazione in Venice

Fashion here feels almost like a punctuation mark, and at the same time the spine of the visual narrative. You’ve deliberately limited yourself to just three designers, when you could have drawn from many more. What led you to that focus on Comme des Garçons, Ayham Hassam, and Christian Lacroix?

Christian Lacroix was pure creative electricity, almost reckless in the best sense. Working with him felt like watching ideas arrive faster than they could be sewn: always more layers, more ornament, more life. An extraordinary talent, but also an extraordinarily kind man, and that combination is rare. I still treasure those moments we worked together; they were as generous as they were intense.

Then there is Comme des Garçons, where Rei Kawakubo keeps pushing form into something closer to emotion than clothing. The pieces feel almost sculptural and poetic, especially when paired with Julien’s headpieces, hovering between the theoretical and the wearable, like ideas that have decided to take physical shape. I’m not sure she’ll love that description, but I hope she’ll forgive me.

And then there is Ayham Hassam, whose work carries a very different intensity: loaded with meaning, urgency, and lived reality. Nothing ornamental for ornament’s sake, every gesture has weight.

With Lacroix, there is also a very personal dimension. His archive, around 2,000 couture pieces, has passed through various hands after his bankruptcy, first through a more commercial phase, and now, fortunately, under the stewardship of owners that are carefully restoring and reorganizing it. When I read that, it felt almost like a dream: the possibility of working again with some of his most important pieces, properly preserved, properly seen.

Downstairs, there is even a short film by Lisa Immordino Vreeland on Lacroix and his importance to couture. It felt of essence to include it, because I owe him something. Our 2019 collaborative show in Paris never really had its moment, as COVID intervened just as we were planning to bring it to New York, to Bergdorf Goodman. It simply vanished into postponement. So in a way, this is that moment finally happening. A belated spotlight, but a necessary one.

Also on display is a Lacroix couture jacket with a rather storied past: it appeared on the November 1988 cover of US Vogue, Anna Wintour’s very first issue as editor in chief. The image, shot by Peter Lindbergh, featured model Michaela Bercu wearing a Christian Lacroix haute couture jacket with a beaded cross, casually paired with a pair of Guess jeans.

That cover marked a real turning point: it pulled couture out of the hushed salons and dropped it into global culture. Suddenly, a $10,000 jacket was being worn not in a gilded room, but on a young woman with a real body, a visible belly, and a pair of $50 jeans. Couture, in other words, met everyday life and didn’t quite know what had hit it. The beaded cross added another layer of tension, a religious symbol sitting right at the center of a very modern visual contradiction, making the image even more charged. Here, the jacket is shown against a composition of Codognato crosses, which quietly echoes that same dialogue: sacred symbols, fashion, and reality all colliding in the same frame, without asking permission.