Viktor&Rolf, the Dutch fashion house known for turning haute couture into a form of conceptual art over the past three decades, will be the subject of “Viktor&Rolf. Spectrum,” the first solo exhibition dedicated to the duo in Italy. The event will take place from September 25 through November 22, 2026, at the Gallery 10 Corso Como in Milan.
This exhibition follows “Yohji Yamamoto. Letter to the Future,” which welcomed more than 20,000 visitors during its two-month run in 2024. The previous exhibition made a strong impression and 10 Corso Como appears to be hoping that the Viktor&Rolf exhibition will live up to the expectations.
Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren met at the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design and started their label in 1993, the same year they won all three top prizes at the Hyères fashion festival in France. Their very first haute couture show was in 1998, more like an art exhibition than a normal runway show, a choice that shaped how they worked for the next three decades. In 2015, they made the unusual decision to stop making ready-to-wear clothes altogether and focus only on couture, a move most fashion houses at the time were not willing to make.
Their work has since become part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Kyoto Costume Institute. They have also had solo exhibitions at the Barbican Art Centre, the National Gallery of Victoria, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunsthalle München, and, most recently, the High Museum of Art. None of these shows, however, has taken place in Italy until now.
Tiziana Fausti started the exhibition, and it is part of 10 Corso Como’s renewed plan to become a space for contemporary culture. The show is also one of several special projects marking the Milan concept store’s 35th anniversary.
Maison Viktor&Rolf made the exhibition specifically for the Gallery’s spaces. Curator Alessio de Navasques teaches Fashion Archives at Sapienza University of Rome and curates the cultural programme at 10 Corso Como. He has designed “Spectrum” as one large installation.
The exhibit consists of 20 haute couture designs, which represent over 30 years of design experience for the fashion house. Instead of following a timeline, it brings some of Viktor&Rolf’s most well-known collections into conversation with each other. This approach shows the connections, repeated ideas, and changes that run through their work over the years.
Pairs form the basic layout of the show. These are not matching outfits, but pieces connected by similar shapes, small variations, or visual echoes of each other. The concept is similar to the collaboration of Viktor and Rolf as two creative individuals, forming a team based on duality. Each garment on display has a counterpart somewhere else in the exhibition, forming a web of connections throughout the space.
“Our work is like a laboratory, a place to experiment and develop ideas. The central focus is always fashion itself. Its codes, its appearance, its structure. Each new season provides an opportunity to approach this investigation from a new angle. As such, our thirty-year plus of work shows an ever-expanding range of positions regarding the subject of our fascination: fashion. These are beautifully represented in the tightly edited presentation at 10.Corso.Como, aptly titled Spectrum,” the designer duo said.
