Viktor&Rolf’s “Spectrum” brings 20 couture looks to Milan

By Grace Kim

Spectrum, the Viktor&Rolf exhibition at 10 Corso Como in Milan, presents 20 haute couture outfits from three decades of the Dutch designers’ career. It is on view through 22 November in the gallery space above the Milan concept store.

Alessio de’Navasques, professor of fashion archives at Sapienza University of Rome, brought the selection together. The garments are shown as ten pairs, creating a dialogue between pieces from different stages of the designers’ careers.

That dialogue expands a principle already visible in Viktor&Rolf’s Spring Summer 2024 couture show. The designers sent out 28 all-black looks, each holding opposites in tension: polished and raw, silly and serious, chaotic and controlled.

One of those looks appears in Spectrum: a deconstructed glittering tulle (fine netting) ballgown layered over a sleek, blush-coloured corset and crinoline (a structured hoop beneath the skirt). The combination gives the exhibition’s central opposition a physical form, with tulle and understructure sharing one outline.

“Our work is like a laboratory, a place to experiment and develop ideas,” Viktor&Rolf said. That laboratory analogy fits the exhibition’s method. Paired garments test a recurring design proposition rather than simply lining up two objects for visual symmetry.

The exhibition’s organizing logic is that, in Viktor&Rolf World, everything comes in twos. The pairing reflects a duality running through both the designers’ partnership and their design ideology. Ten pairs translate that proposition into the gallery’s basic unit of comparison.

The exhibition traces the partnership’s origins to the late 1980s, when Viktor&Rolf met at college in Arnhem. They established their own fashion house in Paris in 1993. Their shared career has developed through apparent tensions rather than a single, fixed house style.

The exhibition account notes that Viktor&Rolf produced ready-to-wear for a number of years. It describes the house’s flamboyance and experimentalism as better suited to haute couture, the category to which the designers dedicated themselves from 2015.

The choice of 20 couture garments narrows the field accordingly. Each pairing lets viewers compare how the designers treated fabric, structure and attitude across three decades. The comparison does not require the rest of a collection; the two works provide the evidence.

Fashion remains the central focus of that work. The exhibition describes their concern as fashion’s codes, structures and aesthetics. A gallery can isolate those elements and let one garment answer another across a room.

What does the gallery setting change?

On a catwalk, garments pass in sequence, and viewers register their overall outlines, surfaces and movement within a timed presentation. In Spectrum, paired works remain in view together, making differences and unexpected correspondences the substance of the encounter.

For visitors, the practical change is clear: the clothes become evidence. Rather than following a seasonal sequence, they can test whether surface, structure and attitude truly operate in opposition, and whether the ten pairs clarify the partnership instead of merely illustrating it.

The gallery also suits the conceptual, sculptural character of the selected clothes. The exhibition account argues that a gallery is at least as suitable as, and possibly better than, a catwalk for those works.

Whether the pairings reveal a sustained design logic or merely restate the theme of twoness will determine what Spectrum adds to the runway. The exhibition remains on view through 22 November.