VENICE BIENNALE
- 5' ELEVEN''
- 31 minutes ago
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In Venice, Fashion Houses Trade Spectacle for Something More Dangerous: Taste
By the time the vaporetto pulls into the Grand Canal at dusk, Venice has already become a kind of hallucination. The palazzi shimmer as if lacquered in candlelight. Water slaps against stone foundations that have outlived empires. During the Biennale, however, the city acquires another layer entirely: a temporary republic of aesthetics, where artists, collectors, curators, billionaires and designers drift through the same narrow alleyways in search of revelation, or at least the next invitation.
Words by Lucie d'Halluin
This year, fashion is not merely orbiting the Venice Biennale. It is defining the mood of the city itself, from candlelit palazzo dinners to quietly competitive private viewings unfolding behind carved wooden doors along the Grand Canal.
The old distinction between fashion patronage and cultural participation has quietly dissolved. Luxury houses are no longer content to sponsor a pavilion dinner or place a logo discreetly beside an exhibition wall. Increasingly, they are behaving like cultural institutions themselves: commissioning artists, restoring buildings, funding archives, shaping conversations about craft, identity, memory and power. Venice, with its decaying grandeur and operatic sense of history, has become the perfect stage for this evolution.
No project captures that shift more completely, or more movingly, than Dries Van Noten’s inaugural presentation for the newly established Fondazione Dries Van Noten.
Housed inside the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, one of the most haunting residences on the Grand Canal, “The Only True Protest Is Beauty” unfolds less like an exhibition than like an act of seduction. Visitors move through twenty rooms layered with frescoes, Murano glass, fading velvet and dust-heavy light, encountering more than 200 works spanning fashion, jewelry, ceramics, sculpture, photography and collectible design.
The title itself comes from the songwriter and activist Phil Ochs: “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” But the exhibition refuses beauty as decoration. Instead, beauty becomes tension, something unsettling, almost subversive.
“We are interested in beauty not as an answer, but as a question,” Dries Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe write in the accompanying text. “It is not an escape from reality, but a way of engaging with it.”
That philosophy is embedded everywhere in the show.
A monumental sculpture by Peter Buggenhout greets visitors in the portego like the remains of some unknowable civilization, its dust-covered ambiguity immediately disrupting any expectation of polished luxury. Nearby, Steven Shearer’s photographs of sleeping figures converse with Codognato’s memento mori jewelry and archival Christian Lacroix couture under ceilings painted with allegories of light conquering darkness. Fashion here is not treated as celebrity bait or commercial product. It functions instead as intellectual material.
Fifteen Christian Lacroix silhouettes, many sourced from private collections, appear almost ecclesiastical within the palazzo’s decorative excess, while archival Comme des Garçons pieces by Rei Kawakubo, swollen, sculptural and uncompromising, read like wearable philosophical propositions. Elsewhere, the Palestinian designer Ayham Hassan introduces garments shaped by life in the West Bank, where constraint itself becomes a design vocabulary.
What distinguishes the project from the increasingly crowded ecosystem of luxury-sponsored art initiatives is its resistance to branding. There are no oversized logos, no immersive “experiences” optimized for Instagram. The atmosphere is unusually intimate, even vulnerable. The rooms feel arranged according to emotion rather than strategy.
That makes sense. Dries Van Noten has always understood fashion less as trend production than as cultural accumulation: textiles carrying memory, color functioning as biography, clothes existing as emotional artifacts.
After stepping away from his namesake label in 2024, he could easily have entered the familiar afterlife of the great designer, memoirs, honorary awards, selective collaborations. Instead, Venice suggests something more ambitious. The Fondazione appears designed not to memorialize a career, but to expand it.
And in a Biennale season increasingly dominated by political noise and institutional turbulence, that quiet insistence on craft, slowness and material intelligence feels unexpectedly radical.
Elsewhere across Venice, fashion houses are staking out their own cultural territories.
Fondazione Prada continues to operate as one of the city’s most intellectually rigorous presences, blurring the boundaries between contemporary art, cinema, philosophy and architecture. This year’s programming extends Prada’s long-standing interest in art as a laboratory for ideas rather than merely an accessory to luxury. At the Biennale itself, Prada’s influence remains less performative than infrastructural, woven deeply into Venice’s cultural fabric through restoration projects, exhibitions and patronage.
Louis Vuitton, meanwhile, transforms its Venetian outpost into an immersive meditation on digital identity and spirituality. At Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, Lu Yang’s “DOKU The Illusion” turns the space into a futuristic chapel of mirrored surfaces, AI-generated imagery and Buddhist references, where consciousness itself appears unstable. It is exactly the kind of technologically sophisticated spectacle that luxury brands increasingly excel at producing: seductive, cinematic and slightly disorienting.
CHANEL, by contrast, has focused its Biennale presence less on exhibition-making than on cultural diplomacy. Its Chanel Next Prize dinner gathered artists, curators and musicians inside a candlelit Venetian palazzo for a celebration that felt somewhere between patronage and performance art. Patti Smith performed. Murano glass shimmered across banquet tables. Yana Peel spoke about artistic exchange in fractured political times. One sensed Chanel positioning itself not simply as a fashion house, but as a convener of intellectual and creative networks.
Zegna has taken a different route entirely, sponsoring the Italian Pavilion and embedding its own materials directly into the exhibition itself. Earth, minerals and ash sourced from Oasi Zegna, along with yarns from Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna, were incorporated into artist Chiara Camoni’s installation “Con te con tutto.” It is a particularly Italian form of luxury patronage — one rooted in landscape, manufacturing and continuity rather than spectacle.
Taken together, these projects reveal how dramatically the relationship between fashion and art has changed.
There was a time when luxury brands approached the art world with a certain anxiety, eager for cultural legitimacy. Now many of them possess resources that rival museums themselves. They commission scholarships. They restore architecture. They fund experimental practices institutions can no longer afford to support.
Of course, cynicism remains easy. Fashion houses benefit enormously from this association with culture. Art confers seriousness. Venice offers mythology. Patronage, especially in a city as emotionally loaded as this one, wraps luxury in the language of intellect and permanence.
And yet reducing these projects to marketing alone misses something essential.
Because what Venice reveals, especially this year, is that fashion’s deepest ambitions have shifted. The runway is no longer sufficient. The contemporary luxury house increasingly wants to shape not only what people wear, but where they travel, what they collect, which artists they follow and what cultural experiences become desirable in the first place.
That ambition can produce empty spectacle.
But occasionally, as inside Palazzo Pisani Moretta, where Dries Van Noten has filled crumbling Venetian rooms with fragile objects, difficult beauty and the lingering evidence of human hands, it can also produce something unexpectedly affecting.
Not branding. Not content.
Something closer to cultural memory.
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