Label Curatorial

The artist Salvador Dalí sought to deliver Surrealism to its final frontier to "transform reality" by weaving through the fabric of mass culture his complex ideas parlaying the consciousness of exclusionary worlds into popular culture. Dalí enacted this transformation through the culprit of the most familiar components of modern life, one of which would be the uniform made in fashion. Along with the Surrealists, Dalí saw fashion's archetypal power merging exalted states of beauty, primal desire and metamorphosis as a central source of its visual semiotic vocabulary. The artist was the most vigorous in bringing Surrealism to the forefront of the archetypal role fashion could play in culture. He worked with some of the most renown fashion designers, directors, actors choreographers and dancers of the 20th Century while revolutionizing particularly the world of fashion. Recalling how costume signifies the potentialities of a shaman in a magical ritual, Dali, who viewed himself as a modern day alchemist saw costume as a means to initiate both a transmutation of the self and the world at large.