Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The city is grey, the light wan, but no matter: in the newly reopened Grand Palais, la dolce vita reigns. A black dress fashioned like the Eiffel Tower waves you in, and Paris begins 2025 with as sumptuous, seductive and intelligently enjoyable an exhibition as it has hosted this century: Dolce & Gabbana’s Du Cœur à la Main (From the Heart to the Hands).Conceptualist art giants — Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor — have previously filled these monumental spaces, but D&G’s inventive mise-en-scène, taking you on a Grand Tour of Italian painting, sculpture, architecture and opera, unfolding how each has inspired their alta moda (haute couture) and alta sartoria (formal menswear) collections, outdoes them all. As spectacle and human-centred drama, the show, launched last spring in Milan and continuing its global tour here, turns the Grand Palais into a pleasure palace.One minute in, you tread the stone steps of a replica of Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples. Ethereal columnar dresses recall goddesses’ drapery in ancient sculpture, togas are based on Ionic chitons and a velvet/chiffon robe with Lurex lace corset is embroidered to resemble a painted Greek vase. The next moment the setting is a Byzantine basilica whose mosaics are evoked in dazzling, sequin-studded suits, including one recently worn by American rapper Lil Nas X.In a high-colour animated version of Rome’s Farnese Gallery, deities from baroque master Annibale Carracci’s erotic fresco “The Love of the Gods” frolic across the walls, pagan backcloth for gowns exquisitely painted or sewn in petit point with icons of Christian art, here metamorphosed into a pop aesthetic. Gabriel and Mary from a Botticelli “Annunciation” face each other on two sides of a cape. Figures from Raphael’s “The Sistine Madonna” wrap themselves around a coat whose sweeping green shoulder pads and sleeves imitate the curtain in the painting.Ten such voluptuous, erudite tableaux make the visitor feel both king or queen of the catwalk, and enveloped in a sort of gloriously squandered scholarship: history in the service of fashion’s whimsy and frivolity. You watch yourself reflected in a hall of mirrors hung with antique chandeliers and celebrating Venetian glassmakers, Murano flowers and baubles sparkling on the costumes. Slinky black lace shares an aesthetic with the widows’ weeds and dark veils prevalent in Italian neorealist cinema. Around a gilt pulpit in a baroque room entitled “Devotion”, hung with a gold heart, a treasure chest spills fine jewellery.Witty and beautiful, sacred and profane, each scene turns on materiality yet mystery, exotic dreams grounded in the workmanship that, as the title tells, translates ideas and emotions — the heart — into handmade garments. At the show’s centre, a working atelier, sometimes with actual tailors sewing and cutting, demonstrates the craft core to haute couture.You can lose yourself in atmosphere or zoom into seam-stitching, pearl ornamentation, beadwork, buttons, the devil in the detail. At the exhibition’s Milan premiere, Isabella Rossellini recalled wearing a demure D&G white lace blouse — adding that the buttons were stitched “as if they were bursting out, my breast coming out like a lion in a zoo!”Sensuality underlying order, a balance of secular and spiritual allusions, are embodied in the show’s poster image: a model wearing a tight gold macramé lace dress and filigree crown and veil. This pays homage to the golden Madonnina atop Milan’s cathedral; Domenico Dolce, born near Palermo, remembers arriving in Milan in 1980 and praying to her “not to send me back to Sicily and to let me stay here. And she listened to me.”Dolce, now 66, stayed and began a collaboration with Milan native Stefano Gabbana, 62. Although they draw on pan-Italian influences, the contrast between Milanese worldly elegance and Sicilian folk heritage is potent.From the south come the bright hues, arabesques, geometric patterns of Sicilian ceramics, on display around a traditional, gaudily painted wood and tiled processional cart produced by Ceramica Bevilacqua in Caltanissetta. Feathered headdresses imitate those worn by the horses, the soundtrack is folk songs. Then the carnival energy fades, yielding to pealing bells accompanying Sicilian wedding cake baroque: pale “stucchi” dresses adorned with cherubs, volute scrolls, angels’ wings. They copy in fabric the elaborate white stucco church designs of Sicilian rococo plaster sculptor Giacomo Serpotta. He coated his pieces with powdered marble dust; the clothes too have a glossy sheen — simple but opulent.The Milanese rival is a red-curtained evocation of La Scala’s tiered boxes featuring a crowd from D&G’s Milano Teatro collection, on a stage laid with a banquet as Verdi and Puccini play: a crimson organza cape with pleated lace ruff and ostrich feathers with the libretto from Tosca in gold thread; a jacket embroidered with the score of Falstaff; a punkish black sweatshirt constructed from sequins forming Verdi’s portrait. The integration of art and fashion — from Yayoi Kusama’s designs for Louis Vuitton to the Louvre’s forthcoming first fashion exhibition, Louvre Couture — is a growing trend, a response both to widening audiences for contemporary art and the triumph of sociological approaches within art history. Du Cœur à la Main, however, sets a new bar for both ebullient pageantry and intellectual hinterland. Most stunning is an atmospheric recreation of the ball scene from Luchino Visconti’s film of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, the setting in Palermo’s Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi meticulously delineated, including floor tiles with leaping leopards. The film plays from four large screens within ornamental mirrors. Dolce cites it as “a fundamental reference for us . . . emblematic of the opposing dynamics that drive fashion, always divided between past and future”. Hand-painted on the hem of an alta moda leopard dress inspired by Angelica’s billowing crinoline are the novel’s famous lines “everything needs to change, so that everything can stay the same”.Nostalgia and postmodernism, innocence and irony — the delicious, extravagant fakery of simulacra, replicas, copies, appropriation — are inseparable here. Time, place, culture, gender — many pieces are androgynous — fuse: there’s D&G’s first haute couture item, a mini lace crinoline, and a dress bursting with fruit from a Caravaggio still life; a sweater is collaged from patches of mink, a kimono from sequins shaped as ancient coins.Through it all, we leave our world of screens and virtual reality for Dolce & Gabbana’s reverence for the handmade and artisanal. Its subject is luxury available to the few, yet the displays feel immersive, democratic; meandering the labyrinth of rooms, we curate our own Grand Tour. The exhibition succeeds in the same way as The Leopard, the story of an elitist aristocrat that compels because every reader irresistibly identifies with the Prince.January 10 to March 31, then touring. grandpalais.frFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
