How some seldom publicly seen Salvador Dalí paintings wound up on view in the U.S. and served as design inspiration for Kent State University fashion students is as much about fate as it is about serendipity.

Two years ago after visiting his friend Marc Nelson, who runs Marc Nelson Denim in Knoxville, Tenn., Paolo Torello-Viera, president of Tailoring Americas, which is part of the Brussels-based textile company Scabal, was ready to call an Uber to get to the airport. But Nelson insisted that his intern Cecilia Kirk, who was a Kent State University student at that time, drive Torello-Viera instead. The pair chatted en route and Kirk asked Torello-Viera for a business card when she dropped him off.

During a semester abroad in Florence, she reached out to him to inquire about interning for Scabal. (Kirk did such a “magnificent” job that the company hired her full time, Torello-Viera said.)

Later while speaking with Scabal’s owner about the planned restoration of 12 Dalí paintings that had been commissioned by the company’s founder Otto Hertz in 1971, Torello-Viera said he had the idea to work with Kent State students to use the paintings as a source of design inspiration. That was, after all, how they had initially come to be. Scabal produces luxury fabric in its Huddersfield, England, mill for other companies and its Scabal Tailored and Sportswear menswear collections. In 1971, Hertz commissioned the surrealist artist Dalí to create a series of paintings that envisioned what menswear would look like in the year 2000.

Sure enough, the “Dalí Beyond Time, Fashioning the Future” exhibition and a fashion show featuring 29 Dalí-inspired designs by Kent State fashion students took place at the Peg’s Foundation Gallery in Hudson, Ohio. The artwork had not been on view in North America and has rarely been displayed in Europe.

Through the years, Dalí’s ties to fashion were evident in different ways. He was among the artists to attend Elsa Schiaparell’s fashion shows and to collaborate with the designer. In December 1936, Surrealism inspired the window displays at Bonwit Teller, where one chaotic display was created based on sketches that were submitted by Dalí himself. Hundreds of teaspoons covered the floor, dozens of cocktail glasses were suspended from a dinner jacket and red arms with white fur fingernails reached out from the wall towards a mannequin’s head that was a mass of red roses. Other windows incorporated costume accessories with alarm clocks, red lobsters and other favorite motifs of the surrealists.  

His 1971 pursuits included giving Alice Cooper permissions to use his “Geopolitics Child” painting for an album cover. They connected through a friend of Cooper’s, who was part of the Sunset Strip drag group Boys Together Outrageously. Earlier in the year, he attended Coco Chanel’s funeral in Paris.

The exhibition wrapped up a nearly monthlong run on July 5. During the show, six students were singled out as Dalí Vision Award winners. Now the Dalí paintings and the work of the Dalí Vision winners are being displayed at the luxury furniture designer B&B Italia in midtown Manhattan for a limited time. They will be on view during the showroom’s normal hours, before the artwork heads back to Scabal’s headquarters in Belgium. None of the students’ designs are being sold but Scabal has developed a line of fabrics that were inspired by Dalí for commercial purposes.  

The alliance with Kent State and Peg’s Foundation was crystallized over dinner, following a Supima fashion show with Mourad Krifa, the director at Kent State’s School of Fashion, and Rick Kellar, president and chief executive officer of Peg’s Foundation, according to Torello-Viera. After Kellar mentioned that his organization had opened a gallery in Hudson, Ohio, Torello-Viera recalled telling him, ”‘You know in a couple of months you’re going to have 12 Dalí paintings hanging there — I don’t take no for an answer.’”

Having only met Torello-Viera that night, Kellar said Monday that his initial reaction was to suggest more prestigious cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Akron Art Museum. “He stopped me and said, ’No, this is about fashion and relationships.’ I said, ‘You just met me, man,’” Kellar remembered with a laugh.

But Torello-Viera’s vision encompassed the Kent State School of Fashion students and his emerging relationship with Kent State’s leadership, as well as Peg’s Foundation, an organization that aims to improve the lives of people with mental health issues. Up until that point, Peg’s Foundation focused more on local arts even though other areas involved working on the state and national level. Kellar said, “We really wanted to think bigger about how we did our arts stuff so we built this gallery. The fact that our third show in the gallery has Salvador Dalí paintings is pretty remarkable,” Kellar said. “It’s positioned us with pressure. After having this show, it’s like, ‘What are you doing next?’”

Peg’s Foundation founder Margaret “Peg” Clark Morgan studied fashion and business at Kent State, thanks to a one-year scholarship. Her father Howard Clark, who was a mason, built many of the university’s buildings. In addition, the foundation endows the directorship of the Kent State School of Fashion. The partnership with the school will carry on.

More than anything, Torello-Viera said the opportunistic aspects of the project is what he finds most gratifying about the whole endeavor, not only for the students, but also for himself in terms of working with and learning from the students. He said, “These kids see things with a set of eyes that is totally different from mine. Sometimes, when looking at a garment, to be honest, I was not impressed. But after listening to their thought process behind it, I was blown away,”

He also spoke enthusiastically about the chance to work with Krifa and Kent State’s president Todd Diacon. “It’s a privilege,“ he said.