How an Erotic, Religious Painting Became One of Fashion’s Favorite Motifs

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s solo debut at Valentino was the talk of Paris Fashion Week, thanks in part to one shocking pink shaved-velvet car coat—it’s the piece on every editor’s wish list—but mostly to a collaboration with legendary designer Zandra Rhodes. For the Spring collection, Rhodes was given Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th-century painting The Garden of Earthly Delights as a jumping-off point. Rhodes’s line drawings of erupting volcanoes and flying birds made for beautiful prints on Piccioli’s floating dresses, so lovely, you might even forget that the original source material features such shocking scenes of orgies and bestiality.

Piccioli and Rhodes are far from the first to touch upon Bosch’s allegorical painting as a reference, though. Alexander McQueen, Raf Simons, Jun Takahashi, and Guillaume Henry have all used the work as inspiration, turning Bosch’s fantastical scenes into prints and patterns at various stages of their careers. The question remains: In an industry that’s used the graphic rectangles of Piet Mondrian and the Pop Art sketches of Andy Warhol, what makes a religious work from the Middle Ages so appealing?

The answer might not be in the specifics of Bosch’s painting—you could spend a lifetime analyzing the actions of the artist’s perverse figures—but rather in the overarching theme. Painted in the Netherlands prior to the Reformation, the common reading of the work is as an allegory for sin, depicted across a triptych. At left is the marriage of Adam and Eve in Eden, at right is a gruesome depiction of eternal damnation, and in the middle is a hell of a good time of sexual encounters and blossoming fruits. Owls become people; nude men stampede around a pool of bathing ladies; lovers embrace inside a pomegranate. The sexual references are not subtle, but they are highly imaginative. Art historians have quarreled about specific motifs and interpretations, but the message seems clear enough: You start out holy, and could end up damned if you partake in any of the frisky good times life will present you.

Unsurprising, then, that the painting’s popularity has risen in fashion as the state of the world sours. At Alexander McQueen’s final show, which was near complete before his death in February of 2010, Bosch’s painting was turned into a jacquard on a minidress with black pleated skirt. “He wanted to get back to the handcraft he loved, and the things that are being lost in the making of fashion,” said Sarah Burton at the time. “He was looking at the art of the Dark Ages, but finding light and beauty in it.”

Below, a look back at more shining moments in fashion’s love affair with Bosch.