Can a suit create a new ritual? Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton and fashion historian Olivier Saillard come to the Roof for the first time, with a unique performance, starring the costumes from Pasolini’s iconic films.

Ceremonial fashion show and, together, a totally idiosyncratic tribute to the great non-conformist filmmaker, poet and activist Pier Paolo Pasolini who was brutally murdered at the age of 53 in 1975, is the original performance-live installation inspired by fashion curator Olivier Saillard and British actress Tilda Swinton, longtime artistic collaborators.

The special performance-contemporary rite entitled “Embodying Pasolini” (Incarnating Pasolini), presented at the Onassis Foundation Roof from December 11 to 16, comes to remind us of the importance of the Latin saying “Lacrimae rerum” (“[υπάρχουν] tears for things”).

High fashion meets high art with Tilda Swindon’s androgynous body as a canvason which parades and registers as a fact a collection of more than thirty costumes and objects designed in the 1960s and 1970s by Danilo Donati and prepared by the Farani atelier for the films of the Italian director.

Costumes and objects that are works of art in themselves: from the biblical, inspired by Bedouin caftans and painted emerald – as if from a painting by Domenikos Theotokopoulos – Herod’s costume in the “Gospel of Matthew” from 1964 to the hand-made from end to end ‘ edge and feather and shell-embellished costume and crown worn by Silvana Mangano as Jocasta in 1967’s Oedipus the Tyrant and from there to the clothes and props of the exotic One Thousand and One Nights (1974) and the sweeping Salo, 120 days in Sodom” (1975).

Except here Swindon herself, like a silent mannequin, puts on the suits one by one, for all to see. Captured in the fabric, she does not interpret the roles of the actors who first wore them. Instead, her role is precisely the absence of a role, highlighting a now-orphaned costume, cut off from the body, from the actors, from the films. Able to move, as he appears sparkling in his priestly solitude.

For the first time, dozens of costumes by Danilo Donati

This is the fifth collaboration between Swindon and renowned fashion historian Olivier Saillard. Their first collaboration took place in 2012 at the Paris Fashion Museum, Palais Galliera, with the actress “activating” garments from the museum’s collection of historical costumes: from Victorian gowns and Napoleonic military uniforms to pieces from the houses of Chanel, Schiaparelli and Balenciaga .

“Embodying Pasolini” is inspired by the Italian project “RoMaison”, a program that pays homage to the traditional ateliers of Rome, exploring their relationship with fashion and cinema.

The show presents -most of them for the first time after their manufacture- dozens of dresses and coats, processed with various experimental techniques of Arte Povera, by the hand of Danilo Donati himself. They are accompanied by the wooden molds of Laboratorio Pieroni, which were the basis for the creation of the hats in Pasolini’s films.

Donati was awarded two Costume Design Oscars: first in 1968 for Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and then in 1976 for Federico Fellini’s Casanova. His collaborations with the two legendary directors, as well as with Luchino Visconti and Pasolini, remain among the most iconic in world cinema.

Pasolini, famous for his heretical works, his poetic and at the same time insightful look at the human condition and his socio-political and religious concerns, found the ideal partner in the person of Donati, whose costumes lent authenticity and historical accuracy (or, in the case of “Salo, 120 Days in Sodom”, sadistic emphasis) in the Italian director’s cinematic edifice.