April 28, 2025 |
The opera is a place of grandeur, high notes and dazzling costumes. It’s the ultimate high art – and it enchanted the world’s most famous mademoiselle, Coco Chanel, in more ways than one. Impressed and enraptured by Igor Stravinsky’s music, theatricality and personality, she was rumoured to be in the throes of a passionate affair with him in 1920, when the Russian mastermind and composer of The Rake’s Progress, Oedipus Rex and Persephone took refuge in the French designer’s country house.
Händel’s opera ‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto’ at Opera Cologne, 2023, with costumes designed by Christian Lacroix; Photography by Karl and Monika Forster
Although they ended up on opposite sides of the political spectrum when Germany banned Stravinsky’s ‘degenerate music’ from 1933, the alleged love affair endured. Today the luxury house that carries Coco Chanel’s name is a vocal supporter and sponsor of Paris’s state opera, the Palais Garnier; for its AW haute couture show, Chanel presented its collection under the opera house’s red ceiling.
Both opera productions and fashion shows can be intimidating experiences, as the latter are also fuelled by the notion of elegance and exclusivity. Opera is, of course, an Italian invention, and Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have made no secret of their love of the art form. Their first Alta Moda show in 2012 featured a performance of Norma, they are the fondatori sostenitori (benefactors) of Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala and in 2019 they presented a 149-look collection that was inspired by 12 of the country’s most famous operas.
Although the aesthetics of luxury houses and opera’s rich tradition are happy bedfellows, since the early 2000s more and more designers have been seduced by opera’s drama and creativity, allowing them the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild and design worlds outside the bounds of their labels. Christian Lacroix, Valentino Garavani, Giorgio Armani and Miuccia Prada have all been seduced by the medium, with Mrs Prada designing costumes for Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila, performed at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2010. Mr Armani created the costumes for the cast of Jonathan Miller’s production of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, which opened at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on January 18, 1995. The costumes reflected the designer’s effortless style.
“Opera is a border territory between different genres,” Mr Armani says. “Between music and storytelling, between movement and the typical gravity of music, between the 19th and 20th centuries, and I find the challenge of some directors to make it more contemporary interesting.”
The designer and director reunited for the same opera in 1997. “I reworked a number of costumes from the SS97 collection, adapting them to the timeless Neapolitan atmosphere that characterised the staging of the production,” he says. “It was exciting. The costume is one of the various levels of interpretation of a performance. That fascinates me.”
For Christian Lacroix, it was a return to his first love. He founded his fashion house in 1987, two years after his first foray into costume design. In 2003 he designed the costumes for Mozart’s Il re Pastore (The Shepherd King) and he rekindled the romance more ardently in 2023 with work for Georg Friedrich Händel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. Last year, he designed costumes for 12 productions alone.
Yuval Sharon’s 2019 production of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ at Staatsoper Berlin, with Julian Prégardien as Tamino and costumes by Walter Van Beirendonck; Photography by Monika Rittershaus
The avant-garde also plays its part in sustaining this love affair. Viktor & Rolf designed costumes embellished with Swarovski elements for the 2019 production of Der Freischütz at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. In 2015, Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck brought his subversive and hyper-real universe to Akhnaten at the Antwerp Opera. A few years later, Oskar Schlemmer’s costumes for Das Triadische Ballett (1920s) greatly influenced his bold and playful marionette-inspired pieces for a new production of The Magic Flute at Staatsoper Berlin. That same year, 2019, Rei Kawakubo created costumes for Orlando at the Wiener Staatsoper. The costumes are uncannily Kawakubo, with her signature twist: big, padded pieces with patterns.
Giulio Cesare will return to the Opera Cologne stage this summer. “As an art historian, Mr Lacroix has an enormous amount of knowledge. He can capture the style of every epoch seamlessly,” say Annette Wolters- Perryman and Teresa Schimmels from the costume department. “At the same time, he has so much experience with choosing the right silhouettes and materials. He understands how to put the performers into the limelight.”
In the opera framework, people from traditional fashion design backgrounds can marry their technical knowledge with unlimited creativity, as costumes are viewed as high art in the operatic world. But in the fashion system the term is less complimentary. When the artist and costume designer Ida Immendorff studied fashion at Central Saint Martins, her garments were always described as “too costumey” by tutors, “as if it was something pejorative”, she says.
“It took me four years of studying and making to realise that being ‘costume’ was exactly where I wanted to be,” she says. “It gave me the confidence to do my final collection, ‘Are You Nuts?!’, as an ode to performers.”
Orlando, played by Kate Lindsey, at Wiener Staatsoper, 2019. The opera’s costumes were designed by Rei Kawakubo.
Instead of participating in the college’s renowned fashion show, Immendorff railed against tradition with a performance in an old theatre in East London. Each piece of her collection
represented a character in their own right. “I love the caricatures that costume allows me to portray with my garments. I live for the theatrical, the showcasing, the grandiose, the breathtaking and the emotion-making.”
Doesn’t fashion play with the theatrical? Immendorff grew up mesmerised by fashion shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s, where the pinnacle of drama and emotion was not an option, it was a given. Shows by Galliano and McQueen were famously ostentatious, even though they worked for the historic fashion houses Dior and Givenchy. But that was more than two decades ago. “The empire of fashion has grown so much, young creatives are intimidated by it,” says Immendorff.
A fashion designer must create functional garments, and a costume designer needs to tell a story within a practical one. Marrying functionality with storytelling not only creates a stunning garment, but also helps the performers do their job. It’s this awareness that has been Lacroix’s success. “His deep understanding of the significance of the costume was a key part of Lacroix’s work in Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” say Wolters-Perryman and Schimmels. “The costumes have to work as a whole with the storyline, music and play. He has a feel for creating costumes that are creative and practical.”
Costumes are like characters themselves. “To me, each costume has its own storytelling. It’s about the colours and the movement,” says opera connoisseur and fashion photographer Simran Kaur.
“Costumes carry a strong personality, sometimes even a soul,” agrees Immendorff. “It narrates a story through every fabric choice. Every seam underlines its uniqueness and every accessory carries a strong symbolism. It’s something that I missed in fashion.” Where the high-fashion system and its endless cycle of collections can burn out a designer, opera – or more broadly, costume – offers a refuge. John Galliano, known for his theatrical shows, emphasised the desire to dream when he left his creative director position at Margiela late last year. And the cultural interest in theatrics continues to rise. Fashion is here to be sold, whereas opera is there to dream and inspire.
“I think designers opt to do costumes because they can see the garment moving,” adds Kaur. “Fashion is so commercialised that everyone is seeing the same image over and over again – you don’t see theatrics in it any more.” We mostly absorb fashion via social media, advertising or e-commerce. The theatrical aspect may remain alive in the show, but all other assets are focused on numbers, not performance.
Last year, Jonathan Anderson signed with American talent agency UTA to push his costume-design career, with the designer coming off a recent collaboration with director Luca Guadagnino. How does it feel when fashion designers take those jobs? “I don’t believe in boundaries within the arts. Some of my favourite costumes were made by painters and artists,” says Immendorff.
The opera and its costumes are a beautiful playground for a designer. If done well, it creates a new world within the operatic sphere. Adding a traditional fashion designer to the repertoire offers a fresh perspective on clothing, and the relationship the performer has to their costume. As Immendorff says, there are no boundaries within the creative world of the operatic universe – the future is endless.
‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto’ will be shown on July 5, 8, 10 and 12, 2025, at 7pm at Cologne Opera. Tickets are available at www.oper.koeln.
Yuval Sharon’s 2019 production of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ at Staatsoper Berlin, with Kwangchul Youn as Sarastro and costumes designed by Walter Van Beirendonck.
Taken from 10 Men Issue 61 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
