BERLIN.- From January 30 to May 31, 2026, the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin becomes an unexpected runway. With two interconnected exhibitions—Gallery Looks. Fashion stagings in the Gemäldegalerie and FASHION X CRAFT: Echoes of Tomorrow—the museum opens a lively dialogue between centuries-old painting and contemporary fashion design.

Rather than treating fashion as a guest in the gallery, the exhibitions invite it into direct conversation with the Old Masters. Paintings, garments, photographs, and films are woven together to show how gestures, colors, materials, and ideas travel across time—and how today’s designers continue to draw from visual traditions shaped hundreds of years ago.

When painting inspires couture

At the heart of Gallery Looks is a simple but powerful question: what happens when historical masterpieces are seen through the lens of modern fashion? The exhibition traces how the compositions, lighting, and symbolism of Old Master paintings resurface in contemporary clothing, fashion photography, and film.

Emerging designers’ works are placed in close proximity to selected paintings from the collection, creating moments of visual echo: a draped sleeve mirrors a painted fold of fabric; a photographic pose recalls a centuries-old gesture. Video works and fashion images expand the dialogue, blurring the line between art form and everyday culture and showing how deeply visual traditions continue to shape modern design.

Fashion inside the museum walls

One of the exhibition’s highlights comes from a photoshoot staged directly inside the Gemäldegalerie. Shortly before the Berliner Salon in early 2025, internationally renowned photographer Ralph Mecke transformed the museum’s galleries into a dramatic backdrop for contemporary fashion. His images reveal striking parallels between modern silhouettes and the painted bodies of the Old Masters, focusing on posture, materiality, and presence.

Filmmaker Florian Azar accompanied the shoot with an atmospheric video, translating the still images into poetic moving scenes. Shown together in the exhibition, the photographs and film underline how naturally fashion and art coexist when placed in the same space.

A global dialogue: art meets couture on the runway

The exchange between art and fashion extends beyond Berlin. For his Summer Show 2026, Jonathan Anderson—Creative Director of DIOR—recreated the exhibition halls of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie as a runway set during Paris Fashion Week. Original paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin, on loan from the Louvre and the National Galleries of Scotland, anchored the show in the visual world of 18th-century France.

Video recordings of this Paris presentation appear in Gallery Looks alongside one of Chardin’s paintings from the Berlin collection, highlighting how historical art continues to inspire contemporary fashion narratives across borders.

Painting and fashion as mirrors of their time

The exhibition also foregrounds fashion as a medium for reflection and transformation. Designers Anne Bernecker, Plaid-à-Porter / Estelle Adeline Trasoglu, Karen Jessen, and Alexander Gigl present works that engage directly with the gallery’s paintings, addressing themes such as beauty, identity, expression, and social roles.

In these encounters, fashion becomes more than clothing—it acts as a tool for reinterpreting art history, translating familiar motifs into new forms and opening fresh perspectives on what both painting and fashion can say about their time.

Curated by Katja Kleinert, with the fashion concept developed by Christiane Arp, Gallery Looks positions the Gemäldegalerie as a space where tradition and innovation meet on equal footing.

Craft, sustainability, and the future of fashion

Running alongside Gallery Looks, FASHION X CRAFT: Echoes of Tomorrow shifts the focus from the finished look to the making process. Five young designers explore whether traditional craftsmanship can survive—and evolve—in a digital age.

Presented as an open atelier, the exhibition showcases handcrafted designs created from deadstock materials, emphasizing sustainability alongside skill. Visitors are invited behind the scenes to see how techniques such as natural dyeing, weaving, basketry, metalwork, and woodworking are reimagined for contemporary fashion.

Developed as part of the Fashion X Craft initiative by Fashion Council Germany, in collaboration with eBay Germany and The King’s Foundation, the project treats craftsmanship as a living, generational dialogue—one that adapts rather than disappears.