Las Vegas has a deliciously stylish new stop downtown. The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, opened A Stitch in Time: Fashion, Law, and the Underworld on October 22, its first fully bilingual exhibition, running through April 2027 in the museum’s first-floor gallery.
The star is pure Las Vegas-meets-Milan: enormous webs created by Dolce & Gabbana with a 3D pen and recycled plastic fill the space — The Spider’s Court (2024), a 92-square-meter installation re-created for Las Vegas, a 25-piece cloud of spiders called The Spider Cloud, a spiderweb dress and a beaded bag, all loaned from the fashion house’s archive. Around them, the museum tells how style and crime have long intertwined: Prohibition-era silk shirts, a wallet made from an inmate’s uniform, hand-printed scarves by Las Vegas pioneer Del Webb, jewelry belonging to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and the automobile gloves of Al Capone.
“Fashion is never just decorative here — it is a record of identity, power and survival,” said Ashley Miller, the museum’s vice president of programs. The exhibition was created with the fashion house and realizzata with the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising’s Fashion Resource Center at Arizona State University.
The exhibition is included with general admission at 300 Stewart Avenue, downtown — an easy, elegant reason to spend an afternoon at one of the city’s essential places.
Photo: Gillfoto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
