Renaissance to Runway: When Italian Couture Takes Its Place Among the Old Masters

The slow, confident migration of fashion into fine art museums has reshaped how we read couture — no longer as fleeting luxury, but as a visual language of cultural continuity. Following the Louvre’s Louvre Couture and the V&A’s Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, the Cleveland Museum of Art now offers its own thoughtful contribution with Renaissance to Runway: The Enduring Italian Houses (November 9, 2025 – February 1, 2026), its largest fashion exhibition to date.

Rather than a decorative flourish in a gallery of Old Masters, the exhibition threads Italian alta moda into the fabric of art history. More than a hundred garments, accessories, and jewels by designers such as Fortuny, Ferragamo, Gucci, Valentino, Versace, and Bvlgari appear in direct dialogue with Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculptures, and textiles from the museum’s collection. The result is not a simple pairing of old and new, but a reflection on Italy’s unbroken conversation between art, craft, and power.

Evening Dress and Wings, Spring 2024, Nicola Brognano, Blumarine and The Annunciation, c. 1580 by Paolo Veronese

Curated by Darnell-Jamal Lisby, Renaissance to Runway reimagines fashion as the latest chapter in a long-standing cultural strategy. Where the Medici and Sforza families once shaped taste through textile trade and portraiture, today’s Italian houses — Armani, Ferretti, or Valentino — project soft power through design. The exhibition traces that lineage of influence: from the rich brocades immortalised by Bronzino to Alberta Ferretti’s lace-trimmed gowns; from Buccellati’s jewelry inspired by Renaissance architecture to Ferragamo’s sculptural shoes echoing classical ornamentation.

Eleanora d’Arborea” Evening Ensemble, fall 2024. Antonio Marras 

This curatorial approach reflects a larger shift across the museum world. Where earlier fashion blockbusters sought spectacle, recent shows favor scholarship — viewing garments not as adornment, but as expressions of philosophy and intellect. Cleveland’s presentation, free of theatrics, belongs to this new, more mature phase of fashion curation: one that treats couture as a historical text to be read, not consumed.