Two worlds of material culture meet in Brussels this autumn. Bozar has opened an unprecedented dialogue between the Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt and the couture archive of Cristóbal Balenciaga, on view from 14 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. The show is curated by María Inés Rodríguez.

The exhibition brings together around fifty works by Dekyndt, about thirty of which are being shown for the first time, alongside more than thirty pieces from the Balenciaga archive. Dekyndt works with fabric, textile and ephemeral substances, testing how materials behave, age and resist. Her practice — tactile, process-driven and often provisional — is placed in conversation with Balenciaga's exacting tailoring and his obsession with the autonomy of cloth.

The exhibition's title, 'The Fabric Decides', is a Balenciaga quote, and the museum takes it as a curatorial principle rather than a slogan. The Rotonde Royale, one of Bozar's most emblematic spaces, becomes the physical hinge of the exhibition: visitors pass from the museum's ceremonial heart into Dekyndt's universe of fragile, process-driven material.

Pairing a living contemporary artist with a couture archive is unusual for an institution like Bozar, and the show deliberately blurs the boundary between art and fashion. It is the first time the two bodies of work have been brought together in this way. Rather than presenting garments as relics, it treats the two oeuvres as parallel investigations of the same substance: cloth as a medium that carries form, memory and meaning. The exhibition runs for more than three months, closing on 31 January 2027.