Maurizio Galante & Tal Lancman Bring Couture, Design and Art to Calais
There are creative partnerships that expand a discipline, and others that quietly dissolve its boundaries altogether. For more than two decades, Maurizio Galante and Tal Lancman have worked in precisely that in-between territory — where couture extends into design, objects borrow the logic of garments, and craft operates as a form of research rather than ornament.
This June, their multidisciplinary practice will be the subject of a major dual-venue exhibition when the Cité de la dentelle et de la mode and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais jointly present Maurizio Galante & Tal Lancman: Haute Couture, Design, Art.
Long associated with lace production, Calais is an appropriate context for designers whose work consistently returns to questions of making. Throughout their careers, Galante and Lancman have resisted treating craft as heritage alone, instead approaching it as a living system capable of adaptation and reinvention.
Galante’s path to couture began in architecture, studying in Rome before founding his Paris couture house in 1996. Structural thinking continues to inform his work, where garments often emphasise construction and volume as much as surface embellishment. Since becoming a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in 2008, his creations have entered major international museum collections, reflecting a practice that has long operated beyond fashion’s seasonal framework.
Lancman arrived from a complementary perspective. Over nearly two decades as an editor at View Textile, he developed a sensitivity to colour, materials and cultural shifts across creative industries. His projects, including Interware and The Art of Living, explore the permeability between fashion, architecture and design — an approach further shaped through collaborations with houses such as Hermès, Baccarat and Shiseido. In 2025, Lancman joined Galante in being named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recognising a collaboration that has steadily expanded couture’s dialogue with other disciplines.
Working together since 2003, the pair have developed a practice in which distinctions between garment, sculpture and design object intentionally blur. Across projects realised with artisans around the world, materials ranging from feathers and lace to ceramic, metal and glass are approached with couture-level attention to technique. Whether expressed through wearable pieces or spatial objects, their work repeatedly examines how traditional savoir-faire can evolve without losing its cultural grounding.
Presented across two institutions, the forthcoming exhibition proposes to reflect this cross-disciplinary approach. By situating couture alongside design and artistic production, the project points to a broader shift already underway, in which couture increasingly extends beyond the body into environments and objects.
This exhibition will offer the opportunity to reconsider couture less as a category than as a methodology — one defined by precision, material intelligence and collaboration.
Maurizio Galante & Tal Lancman: Haute Couture, Design, Art will run 13 June 2026 - 3 January 2027 at the Cité de la dentelle et de la mode and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais.
