Can beauty still save us? In Venice, Dries Van Noten’s artisanal manifesto against immediacy
In Venice, Dries Van Noten turns beauty and craftsmanship into a radical response to speed, algorithms and emotional numbness
What is the role of beauty in modern life? What value does it hold in difficult times? Why does beauty continue to feel relevant? Can beauty become a form of resistance, even a form of protest? Can beauty still save us? Championing anti-algorithm culture and slow, handcrafted creativity, Dries Van Noten returns with a new cultural project. Not as a fashion designer or luxury creative director, but through Fondazione Dries Van Noten—established in Venice with his partner Patrick Vangheluwe—a platform devoted to preserving and supporting arts and crafts in all their forms. In her dispatch from Palazzo Pisani Moretta, alumna Agnese Pasquinelli explores how Van Noten’s inaugural exhibition transforms craftsmanship and emotional depth into a manifesto against immediacy.
Why Craftsmanship and Beauty Feel Radical Again in the Age of Overstimulation
In Venice, reality can feel almost unreal, as light flickers across the Grand Canal in ever-changing reflections and silence settles inside centuries-old palazzi. Stepping into The Only True Protest Is Beauty, the inaugural presentation of Fondazione Dries Van Noten at Palazzo Pisani Moretta, evokes much the same sensation. For the length of the visit, time seems to loosen its hold. And it’s not just for fashion lovers: entering this exhibition means slipping into a suspended emotional state.
That is what makes the experience so affecting. After stepping down as creative director of his eponymous fashion house, owned by Puig, Dries Van Noten turned his attention to the creative industries—and to the algorithms and constant overstimulation that drive them—making an unexpected choice: he slows everything down. He places craftsmanship back at the centre and treats beauty as something far more necessary than ornament: something capable of standing against ugly times as a form of resistance.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
In Venice, Craftsmanship Becomes a Form of Resistance
Borrowed from activist and songwriter Phil Ochs, the title of Dries Van Noten’s first exhibition as founder of his Fondazione—curated with Geert Bruloot, also behind The Antwerp Six , currently on view at MoMu in Antwerp—moves through the palazzo like a manifesto: The Only True Protest Is Beauty.
The show resists polished or decorative notions of beauty: neither superficial beauty nor flawless perfection interests the fashion veteran. Instead, he values a vision of beauty marked by vulnerability, one that embraces many different—even contradictory—artisanal forms, and holds onto humanity at a time when so much around us seems intent on erasing it
Dries Van Noten’s Rebellion Against Algorithmic Perfection
The exhibition unfolds through the Venetian palace in a series of emotional encounters, guided more by instinct than by formal curation. Fashion, art, glass, photography, ceramics, and sculpture coexist without rigid boundaries or imposed hierarchies.
Christian Lacroix couture appears beside monumental contemporary assemblages, while the distorted silhouettes of Comme des Garçons distort the body into something almost conceptual. Murano glass captures and fractures light like water in motion. Throughout the rooms, the objects feel fragile, excessive, wounded, or unfinished in ways that make them intensely alive.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
What Happens When Beauty Becomes Tactile Again
What never emerges is sterility, and that may be the exhibition’s greatest achievement. In many contemporary minimal spaces, beauty is often presented as cold and almost sanitised, designed to circulate rapidly through screens before fading from memory.
Here, beauty regains texture and intimacy, returning to something tactile, deeply physical and profoundly human. You sense the artisan’s hand behind each object, the time required to make it, the uncertainty woven into the process, the imperfections alongside the precision. Every material seems to carry emotion within it.
Why Dries Van Noten’s Beauty Feels So Emotionally Alive
At times, the sensitivity of Fondazione Dries Van Noten’s inaugural exhibition becomes almost overwhelming. A staircase lit by soft reflections takes on a dreamlike quality; a glass flower appears so delicate it could collapse beneath a gaze; an embroidered garment hangs like a relic from another century.
Dries Van Noten understands what much of fashion has gradually lost sight of: beauty can carry grief, contradiction and discomfort just as easily as it can disturb and destabilise without ever ceasing to be beautiful. Throughout the exhibition, beauty is never romanticised. Instead, the show embraces fragility, excess, asymmetry and emotional tension as essential parts of the creative act, giving the works their sense of life and urgency.
Gradually, the palazzo itself becomes inseparable from the works it contains: faded frescoes, worn floors, deep shadows, and the grandeur of Venice always hovering on the edge of decay. Nothing inside Palazzo Pisani Moretta feels preserved in perfection. Visiting the exhibition feels like drifting through a landscape caught between fantasy and memory, where everything seems to breathe.
Venice itself appears and disappears throughout the exhibition’s narrative, the windows concealed behind heavy drapes that partially obscure the view outside, until the city slowly begins to merge with the artisanal pieces on display.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
The Return of the Human Hand in an Era Obsessed With Speed
What emerges as the deepest force of Fondazione Dries Van Noten? Judging by this presentation, it lies in its unwavering insistence on the value of the human hand—a firm opposition to artificial perfection.
But even more than that, the exhibition implicitly rejects the constant demand for immediacy placed on us as both consumers and creators: beneath the beauty on display lies a defence of craftsmanship and emotional depth, both inseparable from time.
Can Craftsmanship Survive a Culture Built for Scrolling?
As you move through Palazzo Pisani Moretta, it becomes clear that The Only True Protest Is Beauty is not asking visitors to admire its 200 objects from a distance. Instead, it invites you to slow down, to take your time, and remain close long enough to feel again. To feel means to be inspired, but also to question yourself and to linger in uncertainty for a while.
Perhaps that is why leaving Fondazione Dries Van Noten made me feel unexpectedly emotional. Once outside, Venice resumed its rhythm with the noise, the tourists and the Biennale crowd arriving in the lagoon. Yet something lingered within me throughout the day: something difficult to articulate, somewhere between gratitude and vulnerability.
During the visit, beauty seemed to offer me both a form of protection from the harshness of the world and a way to question the world itself—to inhabit it more humanly, beyond escapism. Right now, that feels like one of the few truly radical gestures still available.
Agnese Pasquinelli
Alumna, Milano