From Painting to Dress

A work of art as a starting point; the dress as a new surface upon which line, colour and texture take on a different dimension. On 30 September 2026, at the M45 gallery in Milan, the artist and designer Francesca Levi presented seven creations inspired by seven key figures in art history: Joan Miró, Gustav Klimt, Lucio Fontana, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Katsushika Hokusai.
Levi has forged her own path by crossing over into different disciplines. Following her training at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, her studies in architecture and her diploma in Industrial Design at the Polytechnic School of Design, she has worked across art, jewellery, furniture design and fashion. “Fabric is not a static surface: it follows the body, creates folds, reacts to light and constantly shifts perspective. The design runs across the bodice, continues down the sleeves, may disappear along one side and reappear at the back. To fully understand each piece, a front view is therefore not enough: the dress demands to be observed in space,” explains the designer.
The seven pieces explore different ways of approaching this transformation. In Klimt’s interpretation, gold-toned satin becomes a luminous surface criss-crossed by spirals, small geometric modules, and trac  metallic elements and splashes of colour.
With Miró, Francesca focuses instead on the power of line and colour: red, blue, yellow and black emerge against the neutral background through simple shapes, delicate lines and suspended figures. The composition unfolds both at the front and the back, utilising the entire length of the dress as a continuous pictorial space. The engagement with Picasso leads towards decomposition. Greys, blacks and silvers construct a succession of planes and geometries that seem to overlap and shift with the movement of the fabric. In the work dedicated to Kandinsky, however, it is rhythm, geometric relationships and the tension between form and colour that become the material for a new composition.
With Fontana, the gesture is reduced to the essential. The reference to the cut and the conquest of space leads Levi towards a more rarefied surface, in which the mark interrupts continuity and visually introduces the void as part of the work. Finally, Hokusai belongs to a different register: that of movement. These are therefore not seven paintings transposed onto fabric, but seven interpretations constructed from different artistic vocabularies. The painting remains visible in its craftsmanship, and each garment retains the uniqueness of the gesture that created it.