Palina Rojinski - Festival de Cannes
Palina Rojinski and the story of the dress that refused the darkness.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas
Some things are not finished when the curtain falls.
On May 12, 2026, actress and presenter Palina Rojinski stepped onto the red carpet of the 79th Festival de Cannes wearing a one-of-a-kind couture piece by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, created from the costume archive of the Salzburg Festival.
For us at HALLE13, this was not simply a beautiful dress in a beautiful place, though it was certainly that. It was the next chapter in the extraordinary life of an object that has already passed through stage, archive, performance, charity, and now the strange theatre of the red carpet.
The dress is part of the Vivienne Westwood x Salzburg Festival collection: a group of unique garments created from historical costumes drawn from the Salzburg Festival archive. The collection was brought together for a gala performance inspired by Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann as part of the inaugural amfAR Gala Salzburg, in partnership with LIFE+, held during the Salzburg Festival on 24 August 2025.
The life of the piece worn in Cannes began long before the red carpet, inside the Salzburg Festival archive, as costumes once worn by opera singers, actors, and performers. These objects carry the strange dignity of theatre: designed to disappear into a role and often tailored for a single body, survive the blinding light of a handful of performances, and return to the dark of an archive. Most costumes accept this fate.
This one did not.
For the amfAR Gala Salzburg, Andreas Kronthaler and the Vivienne Westwood studio cut up, reworked, reimagined, and reinvigorated selected costumes from the archive, transforming them into entirely new pieces. The original garments were taken apart, combined, re-sewn, and brought together with elements from current Westwood collections. In the performance, the figure of Death wore a black corset dress with beaded shoulder pads, fringed sleeves falling down the front, and a long taffeta train.
Kronthaler’s intervention makes something plain: culture is not passive, history is not fixed, and roles are never fixed. What we inherit can be argued over, carried, misread, repaired, cut, and re-sewn. To literally cut into the archive was, as a cultural gesture, radical. These garments were not restored. They were not preserved. They were recast.
Given life after death, the dress became a stage unto itself. A stage for the performance of life. At the time, Andreas Kronthaler spoke about Salzburg’s special meaning for him and Vivienne, the collaboration with the Salzburg Festival’s costume department, and the purpose behind the auction: raising funds for lifesaving research and the ongoing fight against the global AIDS epidemic. He put it simply: “Theatre is vital.”
After the Salzburg performance, the costumes were sold as part of the amfAR auction led by Simon de Pury. Together with sponsorship funds, the evening raised more than €500,000 for HIV/AIDS research. Following the auction, the garments were entrusted to HALLE13 as custodians.
We never saw them as trophies. We did not want them to become archive pieces frozen in place, admired from a careful distance and slowly drained of the vital force that made them matter. They had already moved too much for that. They had already been costumes, archive notes, artworks, charity objects, witnesses, and participants in living culture.
Our role is to hold them carefully, place them in context, and help them find moments where their plural meanings can be reinvigorated, added to, and circulate again.
Last week, Palina was in Vienna looking for a Cannes look with presence and meaning. We introduced her to the collection. She connected with this dress immediately, or perhaps more accurately, it connected itself to her. Some objects are annoyingly decisive once they know where they want to go.
The result is not a costume in the usual sense, and not simply a red-carpet dress either. It is another chapter of a singular story, reanimated by a new body while quietly carrying fragments of Salzburg, Westwood, performance, activism, charity, and past spectacles into another kind of public space. For us at HALLE13, this is precisely where these works belong: not behind glass, pretending time has stopped. Not confined to a white cube as a decorative footnote to something that already happened. But in motion: on bodies, in rooms, in photographs, in conversation, in culture. Wherever meaning is still being made, which is inconveniently almost everywhere.
A red carpet is a theatre of the immediate: images arrive, are judged, consumed, and replaced almost before they have fully appeared. Beauty moves quickly there. Meaning is rarely allowed to linger.
This dress resists that speed.
Simply by being what it is, it carries more than surface: Salzburg’s theatrical tradition, the craft of the Festival’s costume archive, Kronthaler and Westwood’s unmistakable language, its role within Jedermann, and the original purpose of the gala: raising awareness and funds for HIV/AIDS research and activism.
Memory sits in its seams. Labour sits in its construction. Its purpose sits in its continued life.
No slogan is required. No explanation needs to be pinned to it. The role of Death was not the end. The dress returned to the light, and that material fact creates a meaning beyond its last role, and the roles before that. Its continued existence is the statement.
It is also beautiful.
That matters too. Beauty is not the enemy of purpose. Sometimes it is how purpose gets a body.
The dress holds its own as a singular object of beauty because of the many hands and bodies that have carried it: the Salzburg Festival performers who first gave its materials life on stage, the craftspeople of the costume archive who preserved and understood them, Andreas Kronthaler and the Vivienne Westwood studio who cut and reimagined them, and the people who helped bring the work back into the light.
For this Cannes reincarnation, we are especially grateful for the generous support of our friends and partners at LIFE+, Venturini, Domaine 1196, Douglas-Machat & Cie., and Juergen Christian Hoerl, who quite literally dropped everything last week to help make this moment happen. You can find out more about them below.
At HALLE13, we are drawn to projects and partners that refuse to sit politely inside one category. Art, fashion, costume, exhibition, performance, theatre, charity: these are useful words until they become fences.
This dress has already had several lives: stage costume, Westwood/Kronthaler work, charity object, cultural artefact, red-carpet image. It moves across those categories because of the layers of care, skill, and devotion held in its seams. That is what meaningful culture does. It gathers people, histories, and intentions, then refuses to stay neatly where it is put.
We are immensely proud to help care for this piece, and the rest of the collection, as they continue into whatever lives come next. We are deeply thankful to our friends and partners for trusting us, helping us, and making these moments possible.
And we are especially grateful to Palina for giving this dress such a potent moment in the light.
More soon,
HALLE13
Special Thanks
Life+
LIFE+ is an Austrian non-profit organization (legendary Life Ball 1993–2019). LIFE+ has raised around 30 million Euros for HIV/AIDS research over three decades—in collaboration with partners such as amfAR, UNAIDS, the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. The next edition of the gala curated by LIFE+—under the name All Senses Gala—will take place on August 23, 2026, at the Residenz Salzburg.
Palina Rojinski
Palina Rojinski is a Berlin-based actress, presenter, entertainer, podcaster, DJ, and entrepreneur. Since beginning her television career with MTV Home in 2009, she has become one of Germany’s most recognisable cultural and media figures, working across television, film, live events, fashion, and music. Her acting work includes Willkommen bei den Hartmanns and Nightlife, while her Spotify Original podcast Podkinski has become one of Germany’s best-known interview formats.
Andreas Kronthaler & Vivienne Westwood
Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood carries forward the legacy of Dame Vivienne Westwood, whose work transformed fashion through punk, historical dress, radical tailoring, corsetry, activism, and refusal. Austrian designer Andreas Kronthaler, Westwood’s long-time creative and life partner, has been central to the house for decades and became Creative Director in 2016. For the amfAR Gala Salzburg, Kronthaler and the Vivienne Westwood studio transformed historical costumes from the Salzburg Festival archive into one-of-a-kind garments: part couture, part theatre, part living archive.
Hemdenmacher Gino Venturini
Hemdenmacher Gino Venturini is a Viennese maker of hand-crafted made-to-measure shirts, based at Spiegelgasse 9 in Vienna’s first district. Led by Nicolas Venturini in the third generation, the house has produced bespoke shirts for more than 100 years, combining precise pattern-making, hand sewing, fine fabrics, and the quiet discipline of Austrian craft. A long-time friend and supporter of the team at HALLE, Venturini and his team have supported the storage, preparation and presentation of the garments for this project.
Juergen Christian Hoerl
Juergen Christian Hoerl is a Viennese fashion designer and founder of the label JCH Juergen Christian Hoerl, established in 1999. Working from his atelier and boutique at Opernring 23, Hoerl is known for handcrafted eveningwear, ball gowns, bespoke pieces, and precise Viennese couture craftsmanship. For this Cannes activation, he carried out the fittings and alterations for Palina Rojinski, helping adapt the garment for its next life on the red carpet.
Domaine 1196
Domaine 1196 is a winery and cultural destination in Gamlitz, South Styria, rooted in the historic vineyards of Steinbach and Hoch Sernau, where wine-growing has been documented since 1196. The domaine brings together multiple wine brands, regional craft, architecture, hospitality, and contemporary culture in a landscape shaped by wine for centuries. A long-time partner of HALLE13, Domaine 1196 is home to HALLE13’s Styrian outpost and supported this Cannes activation with wine and in-kind services.
Douglas-Machat & Cie
Douglas-Machat & Cie is a Vienna-based private insurance broker and adviser in insurance matters, with a focus on discreet, specialised coverage. For this Cannes activation, DMC supported the project by helping rapidly secure the insurance framework around the garment’s handling, fitting, transport, and public presentation.
Cannes ist der erste internationale Auftritt der Kollektion seit ihrer Premiere in Salzburg, HALLE13 - Curators & Creators - ist eine Wiener Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, die ausgewählte Stücke der Kollektion bei internationalen kulturellen Anlässen zugänglich macht.