Inside Gala’s archive: Spring-Summer Collection

Explore the first chapter of the exhibition ‘The Awakening of the Myth: Gala Dalí’, at the Púbol Castle and in the Village.

Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation and La Roca Village unveil ‘The Awakening of the Myth: Gala Dalí’, a year-long exhibition programme exploring Gala’s enigmatic personality through the lens of her fashion collection. Co-curated by Bea Crespo, Coordinator of the Centre for Dalinian Studies, and Noelia Collado, Deputy Content Director at La Roca Village, with artistic direction by Montse Aguer, Director of the Dalí Museums, the exhibition unfolds across three fashion ‘seasons’. The first – titled ‘Spring-Summer Collection’ – features eight outfits worn by Gala and crafted by illustrious designers such as Givenchy, Pierre Cardin and Christian Dior.

Gala leaning against an olive tree in Cadaqués, beckoning to me; Gala in late summer stooping to pick up a gleaming mica pebble amid the rocks of Cape Creus.
  Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942 

'The Awakening of the Myth: Gala Dalí', at Púbol Castle.

It was in summer, in Cadaqués, that the meeting with Salvador Dalí that was to change everything would take place. The year was 1929 and Gala, who was then married to the poet Paul Éluard, occasioned both fascination and uneasiness, in equal parts. She was ahead of her time and she interpreted the configuration of the modern woman better than anyone, using fashion as a form of expression in defiance of conventions. Her wild curiosity subverted current trends in favour of an androgyny that adopted masculine codes to define a new femininity.

Bathed in the sun’s light, the femme dandy of avant-garde Paris disguised herself as a muse and dazzled. The way she dressed had a poetic dimension that was almost performative, but it was also public and eminently practical. Gala, who in Éluard’s words ‘lives to forget`, changes her skin every day to stage the triumph of talent and consummate her own myth through Dalí. A masquerade that, like the trompe-l’œil print designed by the painter, projects a sometimes misleading, fake image. A liquid and oscillating identity – like the Mediterranean Sea, unfathomable and impossible – like the moiré of ‘tiny scales in all the colours’ of the Dior dress that she was to wear on so many occasions at Púbol.

Credits hero image: Salvador Dalí and Gala at the house in Portlligat, 1958
R. Descharnes / © Descharnes & Descharnes sarl 2024.
Image rights of Gala and Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2024.