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WORDS: DIVYA VENKATARAMAN ART: KIMBERLEE KESSLER
Ask any fashion aficionado, and they will come to you with a different answer to the question of what the most iconic show of the late, great Alexander McQueen’s career was. Perhaps they’ll answer Poupée, the show where models were arranged inside spiky restraints, like strung-up dolls. Or No. 13, staged at the cusp of the new millennium, which ended with the supermodel Shalom Harlow being spray-painted by two humanoid robots. More than likely, though, the answer will be Dante, the Autumn/Winter 1996 show inspired by the Florentine poet and philosopher.
In a dark church in East London, McQueen enlisted kids from the East End (many of whom were not professional models) to don crucifix masks, lace shrouds and Victorian-inspired gowns, many printed with vivid photographs taken in the Vietnam War and the Somali famine. The show’s location was chosen for its controversy – the church was believed to have been built by a closet Satanist – and the show itself leaned heavily on Dante’s vision of hell as depicted in The Divine Comedy. It was intended as a commentary on religion, evil and war. In her book Alexander McQueen: The Life and the Legacy, Judith Watt wrote of the show that “the links between Dante… were implicit at first, but the strange fusion of the inferno of life with the inevitability of death gradually became obvious.”
That show would go on to be one of the most celebrated of McQueen’s career — he was asked to helm Givenchy later that year and also won the first of his four awards for British Designer of the Year from the British Fashion Council. And he’d called on a 700-year-old text to achieve it.
Almost three decades on from that moment, another crop of artists and designers are drawing keenly on the resonances of Dante. Perhaps it’s natural that his work would find its place as a muse among artists, given its potent mix of universality and theatrics. In his most celebrated poem, The Divine Comedy – split into Inferno, Purgatario and Paradiso – the poet captured truths and themes that would resonate far beyond his own time. It traces the path of a fictional version of himself, helped by the Roman poet Virgil, through the nine circles of hell, then purgatory, then finally, heaven. It captures the pain and pleasure of sin, the arduous journey towards repentance, the disorientation of moral uncertainty, and the salvation of finding oneself again.
Take Daniel Roseberry: at Paris haute couture fashion week in 2023, the designer memorably showcased the animal side of Inferno for his collection for Schiaparelli, interpreting the three wild beasts Dante encounters in the forest – the leopard, the lion and the she-wolf – as giant three-dimensional foam heads that perched on models’ shoulders. While it attracted controversy (many claimed the animal heads ‘glamourised’ game-hunting), it also thrust Dante back into the fore of the conversation – a place he never seems to stray too far from.
“His work is so rich with inspiration, and so many artists have just done incredible things in the footsteps of Dante,” says Rosh Mahtani, the founder and designer of London-based jewellery label Alighieri. “I feel like [his poems] resonate and stand the test of time because they’re essentially talking about human emotion and fear, and love and feeling lost and being vulnerable… these feelings that we all still find to be so powerful. And I don’t think anyone did it better than Dante.”
It’s these universal ideas that she began to capture – not entirely purposefully – when she started her brand in 2014. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in French and Italian literature, she began to play around with jewellery, teasing out medieval-inspired shapes from gold as she figured out what to do with her own life.
“I just kept going back to Dante. I gravitated towards Inferno, which opens with a man, lost in the dark woods, saying, ‘I’m afraid, I don’t know if I’m good enough, I don’t know the right way,’” she tells me from her London studio. “And that was always my purpose with Alighieri: to say that it’s okay; it’s okay to share our fears and our doubts. And that it’s only by sharing them that we can forge a true kind of human connection.”
Mahtani’s pull towards honesty and rawness finds its manifestation in the physical form of her pieces. Many look rough-hewn and are cast by hand, with textured finishes and irregular bumps and humps. They are an antidote to the cleanness of the dainty, minimalistic pieces that have recently saturated the jewellery market; they’re unafraid to have a point of view.
“We kind of call our pieces, you know, fragments of imperfection,” Mahtani says. “The idea being that these imperfections or crevices and textures are a symbol of vulnerability.”
One of her first pieces, and one she continues to feel attached to, was a gold lion medallion.
“It reminded me of the first canto of Inferno when Dante is on the foot of a hill, and he’s confronted by these three wild beasts,” she says. (The same ones Roseberry turned into his animal heads.) Dante retreats into the forest, where Virgil, his guide, appears and urges his fear into courage.
“I just made that lion to wear for myself, in the beginning,” she says. “To remind me to be strong when I felt like that.”
Dante has also proven a font of inspiration for Jackson Wiederhoeft, the man behind his eponymous New York-based label. For his fall/winter 2023 collection, Wiederhoeft blended Catholic symbolism with Dante’s visions of hell, and threw some Greek mythology into the mix, too.
“We had models walking as Sisyphus and the rock,” he tells me over the phone from New York, referring to the myth in which the tyrant Sisyphus is punished by the gods and made to push a rock uphill for eternity. ‘Sisyphus’ was carrying the model who symbolised the rock. “But we had Sisyphus wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Say No To Drugs’ spelled out in little lines of cocaine, to really bring it into the world of New York and partying and hedonism.”
For Wiederhoeft, the particular appeal of Dante is in the dark and sordid elements of his stories, and how they speak to the human morbid curiosity. “I mean, Dante wrote the whole trifecta – Paradiso, Purgatorio and Inferno – but all anyone cares about is Inferno,” he says. “There’s something so human about being interested in darkness, in hell, in the romance of all that.”
So what kind of relationship do Wiederhoeft’s clients – many of them are brides-to-be who come for his particular brand of gothic-ethereal, untypically ‘bridal’ couture –have with the complex layers of mythology that underpin his work?
“Well, many of them don’t really know about it before they come,” he says. “We had a bride recently who came in for a completely different piece, but then she tried on a dress inspired by the Danaïdes.”
This is the Greek myth of 50 royal daughters, all of whom are ordered by their father to kill their husbands on their wedding nights to save his kingdom. They all do, except for one, who takes pity on her new husband and saves him, despite the punishment she knows she will endure.
“I was telling [the bride] the story while she was wearing it, and she started crying and ended up buying that dress for her wedding,” says Wiederhoeft. “Even though she didn’t relate to the mythology at first. I think that’s the power of these stories: once you hear them, you’re able to weave yourself into them… It’s exciting to create an emotional journey for someone through the garment.”
As it did Wiederhoeft, Inferno also inspired Mahtani’s earliest work. But now, as her brand Alighieri enters its 10th year — and Mahtani herself her 35th — she has found other, unexpected aspects of Dante’s legacy calling to her. After all, there is more to his work than darkness and hell, though those are the themes most commonly associated with him. Throughout The Divine Comedy, there is also beauty and love and hope and visions of better, brighter days.
“Now, I’m starting to think about what the next chapter looks like,” Mahtani muses. “I’m finding myself thinking about Paradise, you know — ideas of blinding light. The light and the beauty being so overwhelming that you almost can’t even look at it.”
Regardless of which aspect of his work speaks to them, Dante has inspired fashion across the aesthetic spectrum — from Mahtani’s talismanic jewels to Schiaparelli’s larger-than-life theatrical haute couture, to Wiederhoeft’s off-beat take on bridalwear, to McQueen’s punkish Victorian gowns. Whether it takes on the lightness or the darkness of his poems, whether it follows the fear or the courage, Dante’s poetry continues to beget more art that draws on what it means to be essentially, hopelessly human.
THIS FEATURE IS PUBLISHED IN THE 17TH EDITION OF GRAZIA INTERNATIONAL. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.
