Last August I went with my beloved husband at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome to visit Dolce & Gabbana’s traveling exhibition “Dal cuore alle mani” (“From the Heart to the Hands,” soon at ICA Miami). We were prepared to be overwhelmed by the general splendour of Dolce & Gabbana’s artwork, but we were not prepared for the aesthetic emotion the exhibition produces on the souls of its visitors. It is a crescendo sentiment that makes all the elements exhibited work in synaesthesia to provoke a feeling of joy and plenitude.
To the ones who are already thinking that this could only result from a proper art piece I would immediately say that “Dal cuore alle mani” is authentically auratic. As Benjamin says, it is by their place in the coherent overall perspective of a collection whose stillness is poles apart from the rapid flowing away of the fashion show, that the fashion creations offer themselves up to the visitor as sources of aesthetic emotion, the exhibition exhaling its aura as “the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be.”
The unique here is not that which appears only once, but something that is unique because it is auratic: the emotional shock of inaccessible genius within hand’s reach, reproducible no doubt, but uniquely reproducible, by hand, and at the exorbitant cost of incalculable work hours. And the crowded exhibition halls exude the amazed devotional atmosphere of a modern temple, fraught with the presence of the sacred and the timelessness of the aura. I had moments of rapture, and I saw people next to me being moved as my husband and I were.
Not even at the Louvre, that I am used to visiting devotionally, have I seen a comparable silent devoted crowd. Nice people with their hearts full of joy before works of art that are evidently works of passion and love. One can immediately feel the love for beauty and the desire of sharing it that inhabits every exhibition room. The cult-like intensity is exacerbated by the theme of at least two rooms, which also correspond to collections that have been constantly renewed by the two designers.
“L’Opera” and “Devotion” are dedicated, respectively, to the opera, and in particular to the Teatro della Scala in Milan, and to the emotional intensity and passion that finds its origin in Catholic devotion, and the processional cult of saints in Sicily, the fatherland and creative soil of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. Devotion is also what this collection produces: a sacred cult of the fashion object, which dresses and adorns religious worship to intensify its manifestations.
This idea is developed in several parts of the exhibition, which takes the form of a dark room recreating the atmosphere of the interiors of Sicilian churches, where women rigorously dressed in sumptuous black lace dresses, and covered by veils of the same fabric adorn themselves with precious jewellery whose thickness, brightness, and abundance of coloured stones contrast with the black of austerity.