Artist Joana Vasconcelos Reimagines Valentino’s Couture Designs
In Lisbon, the renowned sculptor takes the late fashion icon’s creations to new heights in an artful exhibition
“Let’s go to the ball!” says Joana Vasconcelos as we pass through the entrance to a gallery flanked by two female statues, their bodies clad in fine white crochet. The 54-year-old Portuguese artist looks party-ready herself, dressed in a vibrant pink and orange Pleats Please ensemble, but the celebration here is of her collaboration with Valentino Garavani. The pair met a few years ago, after the late Roman couturier had seen an exhibition of Vasconcelos’ sculptures in Malta and then visited her studio in Lisbon. “He said my work was like haute couture,” she recalls. “And I was so flattered. I’d never seen it like that.”
Before long, Valentino had invited her to the house archives in Rome, and the results are now on show in Lisbon, at the Museum of Art and Technology (known as MAAT), as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations. Vasconcelos has had several exhibitions here in the past decade and feels very close to the institution that shows art across all media. “I live five minutes in one direction, and my studio is five minutes in the other,” she says as we stand by a line of glittering and bow-encrusted Valentino bodices each carefully selected by the artist. “So I pass the museum every day.”
Vasconcelos came to public attention in 2001 with a sculpture called The Bride—a large and finely wrought chandelier, with a twist: its 1,400 pendants were not crystal drops but tampons. Ever since, she has created works that challenge notions of women’s roles in society by employing domestic craft techniques, or objects that speak of women’s work, to create unlikely sculptures. In 2023, she made a ceramic wedding cake so large you could step inside it.
Now at the MAAT, she is showing another super-sized work that responds to the incredible finesse of Valentino’s couture techniques. Called the Venus Valkyrie, it fills the first gallery, or ballroom—a vast octopus, with elaborate tentacles that are ruffled, crocheted, and rosetted like the best of the master’s dresses. Around it are 12 exquisite examples of Valentino’s haute couture work while a further 18 are spread throughout the show. “We both work with ideas of transformation and investigate ideas of what it is to be a woman,” says Vasconcelos. “Mine is about transforming the domestic, while he transformed women into goddesses and divas.”
Vasconcelos’s earlier pieces on show here include an early large work, conceived in 1996, where purple feather dusters create a walk-in sculpture that exudes Hollywood glamour, and three kinetic works from 2014 that look like opening and closing flowers but which are created—incredibly—from steam irons, both comments on the drudgery of the domestic realm. By contrast, many Valentino gowns are associated with some very famous women. Here’s a black slip evening dress with a matching tulle cape that was worn by Gwyneth Paltrow to the Venice Film Festival in 2002; another trimmed with ostrich feathers and bugle beads was Anne Hathaway’s choice for the Met Gala in 2013 when the theme was Punk: Chaos to Couture. A stunning silver sheath has graced both Hilary Swank and Jessica Biel. Vasconcelos’s massive heart-shaped sculpture from 2008, created from 4,000 pieces of translucent red cutlery, is matched with a Valentino red taffeta evening dress embroidered with twisted silk cords. Claudia Schiffer modeled it in the haute couture show for Autumn/Winter 1992/3.
In creating the Venus Valkyrie that is the heart of the show, Vasconcelos adopted Valentino’s materials and methods of creation. “I’d never worked with such fine fabrics,” she says of the tulle and silk. Each unfurling leg of the vast octopus responds to a particular Valentino frock. Among these, perhaps the most beautiful is a Harlequin-inspired creation which required more than 8,200 feet of fabric to produce the diamond-shaped panels that make up its skirt. “That dress was the beginning of the Valkyrie,” says Vasconcelos. “It filled me with inspiration.” The artist first saw it as an image, and then discovered it had faded considerably over time once she saw the real thing in Rome. “It made me realize that I was also dealing with history. The dress was over 30 years old.”
“I never expected it to be so magical, to look at this work up close,” says Vasconcelos of visiting the archive. “I knew it was luxury, I knew it was special. But it turned out to be incredibly moving as well.” To see the dresses here is to have the same frisson. The hours of work, the intensity of skill, seems to imbue them with an enduring energy.
The exhibition was originally staged at the Foundation’s exhibition space in Rome, opening in January just days before Garavani died on January 19, 2026. “He was already very ill and couldn’t come to the vernissage,” says Vasconcelos. “But the world of Italian couture was there—all the Fendis, all the Ferettis —and I realized it was one big couture family. All anyone was talking about was Valentino, and how great he was.”
Now the exhibition comes to MAAT in an expanded version. A tenth anniversary celebration has never had so much glamour.
“Venus—Valentino Garavani through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos” is on view until February 22, 2026