The exhibition Gallery Looks – FASHION X CRAFT: Echoes of Tomorrow will be on display in the Gemäldegalerie from 30. January to 31. May and is dedicated to the exciting dialogue between historical art and contemporary fashion. Design, photography, film, and haute couture reveal how the visual worlds of the Old Masters live on in the visions of young designers, giving rise to new and surprising connections.
Image above: Fotoshooting für die Zeitschrift ACHTUNG anlässlich des BERLINER SALONS in der Gemäldegalerie 2025, Entwurf Alexander Gigl, mit Gemälde von Anton van Dyck. Foto: Ralph Mecke.
Gallery Looks. Fashion presentations in the Gemäldegalerie
With “Gallery Looks,” the Gemäldegalerie presents an exhibition that re-explores the exciting relationship between art and couture. The show demonstrates how the compositions, lighting effects, and symbolism of the Old Masters are revisited and reinterpreted in contemporary fashion designs, photographs, and film productions. The colors of the paintings, the materials depicted, and the gestures are reflected in the various media. Fashion photographs, video works, and designs by up-and-coming designers enter into a direct dialogue with selected works from the collection and explore the boundaries between art form and everyday culture.
Shooting between style and fabric
Immediately prior to the presentation of the BERLINER SALON in February 2025 at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, internationally renowned photographer Ralph Mecke staged a photo shoot with models featuring current fashion designs in the museum’s rooms. The resulting photographs reveal surprising connections between contemporary fashion design and the visual world of the Old Masters. With a precise eye for physicality, presence, and scenographic settings, Mecke created photographs that impressively highlight the interplay of body, gestures, materiality, and environment. Accompanying this, Florian Azar shot an atmospheric video in which he translated the shoot into poetic moving images. The film and photographs are shown in the exhibition and illustrate the close connection between fashion and art.
Art meets couture
This dialogue also resonated on the international stage: for his “Summer Show 2026,” Jonathan Anderson, creative director of DIOR since May 2025, had a backdrop constructed that was modeled in detail after the exhibition halls of Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. His first men’s collection was presented in June 2025 during Paris Fashion Week in front of the Hôtel des Invalides. Two original paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin – on loan from the Louvre and the National Galleries of Scotland – linked the staging with 18th-century France, whose aesthetics are reflected in Anderson’s designs. The Paris presentation was conceived as a contemporary dialogue between art, fashion, and space, inspired by the Berlin Gemäldegalerie as a leitmotif. In addition to one of Chardin’s Berlin paintings, the “Gallery Looks” exhibition also features video recordings of the show, which highlight the interplay of historical and contemporary elements in Anderson’s designs.
Painting and fashion – mirrors of the times
Through films and photographs, the exhibition also presents designs by selected designers in dialogue with high-caliber paintings from the gallery. This encounter reveals surprising parallels in the exploration of aspects such as expression, beauty, identity, and social roles. For the exhibition, designers Anne Bernecker, Plaid-à-Porter / Estelle Adeline Trasoglu, Karen Jessen, and Alexander Gigl developed new works or provided designs that interact with the paintings on display. In this way, the close connections between artistic tradition and contemporary design become clear. Fashion becomes a medium of reappropriation and transformation, art-historical motifs are transferred to the present, opening up new perspectives.
The exhibition “Gallery Looks” is curated by Katja Kleinert, curator for Dutch and Flemish art of the 17th century at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. The fashion concept was developed and curated by Christiane Arp, long-time editor-in-chief of German VOGUE and current chairwoman of the Fashion Council Germany.
FASHION X CRAFT: Echoes of Tomorrow
Can craftsmanship survive across generations and continue into the digital age? Five young fashion designers asked themselves this question as part of the “Fashion X Craft” project. Their answer is the “Echoes of Tomorrow” collection, which brings traditional craft techniques into the digital age.
“In this world, craftsmanship reappears in new forms: some details remain vivid, while others blur, dissolve, and merge into a hybrid, futuristic vision of craftsmanship,” say Aleksander Kudrischow, Laura De Sousa, Lennart Bohle, Jon Liesenfeld, and Melanie Parzenczewki, the artists of the V-Collective. This collective is made up of participants in the Fashion X Craft initiative: the project, run by the industry association Fashion Council Germany in cooperation with eBay Germany and The King’s Foundation, offers young fashion and textile designers a tailor-made support program that focuses equally on sustainability, craftsmanship, and innovation. During residencies at the Good Garment Collective in Berlin and a King’s Foundation headquarters in Highgrove, England, participants are introduced to craft processes such as natural dyeing techniques and weaving, as well as techniques such as basket weaving, metalwork, and woodwork that go beyond the boundaries of traditional fashion and textile production.
This year’s group of scholarship recipients created a collection made from so-called deadstock materials—fabrics and fibers that were not used by companies.
The exhibition, which is staged in the form of a studio and brings the creative process behind the collection to life, invites visitors to explore traditional craft techniques, discover contemporary reinterpretations of these techniques, and reflect on the fashion of the future.
WHEN?
Opening (for invited guests only): Thursday, 29. January 2026, 6 pm
Exhibition dates: 30. January until 31. May 2026
WHERE?
Gemäldegalerie
Stauffenbergstraße 41
10785 Berlin
