The surrealist world of Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren is heading to Milan. 10 Corso Como, the city’s pioneering concept store and gallery, will host an exhibition dedicated to the Dutch design duo’s two-decade-and-counting exploration of fashion as performance, sculpture, and cultural commentary.
The exhibition, details of which remain partially under wraps, is expected to span the Viktor & Rolf archives — from their early couture collections that treated the runway as a theatrical medium (the upside-down dresses of 2001, the doll-scale replicas of 2008) through their more recent haute couture and ready-to-wear propositions. The space at 10 Corso Como, with its intimate gallery rooms and the adjoining garden, offers a natural setting for the conceptual narrative that characterises their work.
An opening date and ticketing information are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. For those who follow the duo’s work, the exhibition represents a rare chance to see the full scope of their thinking — from the wearable to the fantastic — arranged in dialogue with the room that houses it.
The choice of 10 Corso Como is significant. Carla Sozzani’s hybrid retail-and-exhibition space has, since its founding in 1990, functioned as a cultural barometer for Milan, hosting artists, photographers, and designers whose work sits at the boundary between commerce and creative expression. For Viktor & Rolf, whose entire practice has tested that boundary, the venue is arguably the most conceptually coherent setting for an archival survey in Italy.
