At Piazza Mignanelli 23, by the Spanish Steps, the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation opens on 18 October a show called Aura. It runs to 21 February 2027. PM23 is their palazzo space, not a shop. Giammetti spoke at the opening: the meaning, he said, sits in the questions inside the paintings, set beside Valentino’s dresses. Both speak about beauty — hidden in the pictures, shown in the cuts. “Women want to be discovered.”

There are 38 pieces from the house archive and 26 oils by the Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz. She paints ladies in old-cut, coloured gowns, without a corset. The faces are not there. She covers them with cloth wound like a turban, with fruit, with flowers, with forms that nod to Arcimboldo. For her, ANSA reported, hiding the face is a metaphor of freedom: it cancels the individual of a given moment and breaks with tradition. Her women stay eternal, she says, because they are not tied to features. “As Valentino’s fashion is eternal.”

In Valentino’s work the woman sits at the centre the other way: colour, cloth, volume, movement. The silhouette is brought out, not covered. That is the meeting point of the show: the same body, two gestures. One reveals. The other hides so another reading can enter. The title, Aura, is the zone where the familiar stays recognisable but changes. It is not an archive parade with four pictures on the wall. Nor a painting show with mannequins. It is a dialogue of palette, of ramages, of volumes.

Juszkiewicz made a new canvas for the rooms, “A Portrait in Valentino Red”, seen here first. She looked at a Haute Couture autumn-winter 2007-08 dress, the house red, with a palm-leaf motif. She said she chose it for its sculptural presence and that she is interested in Valentino’s femininity, between delicacy and strength. Other canvases in the room take European canons — a “Lady with a Mirror” after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, for one — and turn them with the same veil of matter.

Giammetti closed on the foundation’s line: fashion and art should change the gaze on beauty. Matter, colour, form, metamorphosis. Beauty, he said, as a force that generates culture, not only clothes. The show has the patronage of Municipio I Roma Centro. Full ticket 18 euros, 16 online. The rooms are open 11:00–18:30, Tuesday to Sunday; Mondays are closed, with one exception on 19 October, the day after the opening. They also shut at Christmas, New Year’s Eve and 1 January.

Valentino Garavani no longer signs the house collections. The archive, though, remains working material. Aura does not claim to reinvent couture. It sets it beside a painter who refuses the face, to see whether the dress, without a gaze, still stands in for a person.

Image: Peter1936F, Palazzo Mandosi Mignanelli, Rome, 11 March 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows the palazzo on the square, not the exhibition rooms.

Sources consulted: Aura, l'archivio Valentino tra bellezze nascoste e rivelate — ANSA; Aura — PM23 Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti.