A Tailor Walks Into a Museum

Commencing this weekend at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki is Picasso: Designed by Paul Smith, opening 10 October and running to 1 February 2027. More than eighty works travel from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, spanning the Blue Period through to Cubism, plus three pieces from the Gallery's own Robertson Gift. Dr Zara Stanhope calls it the first major Picasso solo show here in over thirty years.

What caught my eye is the second name on the poster. I have known Paul for years, crossed paths with him a number of times, and none of this surprises me. This is not his first pass at Picasso. He was artistic director of the original show in Paris in 2023, marking fifty years since the artist's death. He has said he chose the subjective over the academic, and wanted humour in the rooms alongside deep respect for the legacy. Seriousness with a wink built into the lining. That is a tailor's instinct if I have ever heard one.

Tailoring is staging, in its own quiet way. A jacket is cut to direct the eye, to carry a man into a room before he has said a word. Smith has built a career on that same trick with cloth. It makes sense to me that a museum would trust him with how people move through the story of the man, not just the paintings on the wall. In Paris he went further, hanging living artists alongside Picasso to show the line running forward as well as back. I do not yet know how much of that carries to Auckland's fifteen sections, but the instinct behind it is the interesting part.

Cécile Debray has called the collaboration unprecedented. I would go further and say it is overdue. Art and fashion have always shared a bloodline. For a city that argues constantly about the health of its CBD, this is exactly the kind of drawcard worth having.

I will be at the gallery in October. Not for the paintings alone, but to see what happens when a man I have shared a conversation or two with, trained to dress a body, turns his attention to dressing a room.