East of Collins Expediting  ·  June 2026

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12 Permits. One Exhibition. What It Actually Takes to Permit a Long-Term Special Event in Miami.

A behind-the-scenes look at the permitting architecture behind “From the Heart to the Hands: Dolce&Gabbana” at ICA Miami — told by Suzette Tillit, Special Events Director at East of Collins Expediting.

When the “From the Heart to the Hands: Dolce&Gabbana” exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in February 2026, visitors stepped into a world of immersive rooms filled with over 300 pieces from the brand’s Alta Moda, Alta Sartoria, and Alta Gioielleria collections.

It was a multisensory journey through Italian craftsmanship, art, opera, and architecture — the North American debut of an exhibition that had already captivated audiences in Milan, Paris, and Rome. And it ran through June 14, 2026.

What visitors didn’t see was the permitting work that made four months of continuous operation in Miami possible.

Twelve special event permits. A City Commission approval. A load-in that started in December. And a process that most event producers in South Florida have never had to navigate, because most events don’t last four months.

The Exhibition — and Why It Was Unlike Anything We’d Permitted Before

“From the Heart to the Hands: Dolce&Gabbana,” curated by Florence Müller and produced by IMG, was not a pop-up. It was not a weekend activation. It was a full-scale, room-by-room immersive fashion exhibition — the first of its kind to bring Dolce&Gabbana’s most revered Alta collections to American audiences.

Each room had its own personality — its own scenography, its own visual world. Visitors moved through environments inspired by Baroque architecture, Italian cinema, Sicilian craft tradition, and opera, all while surrounded by pieces of extraordinary delicacy and value.

The load-in alone took close to two months, beginning in December 2025. Hundreds of archival and new collection pieces, each requiring careful, precise handling.

From a permitting standpoint, the challenge wasn’t the complexity of a single permit. It was the duration — and the very specific, often misunderstood rules that govern how long a special event permit is valid in Miami.

The Permit Problem: Seven Days at a Time

Here is what most people don’t know about special event permitting in the City of Miami: a standard special event permit is valid for seven days. That’s it.

Seven days per permit. A maximum of four permits per location per year. That gives you a baseline of 28 consecutive days before the process requires a different approach entirely.

For a four-month exhibition, 28 days is just the beginning.

“In order to get granted an extension by the commissioner, you have to have used up all four event permits for that location first. So I wasn’t even able to go to commission until I had used all four permits. I got them early specifically so that I’d be ready to move to commission and handle that coordination in time.”

— Suzette Tillit, Special Events Director, East of Collins Expediting

In practice, that meant pulling all four seven-day permits back-to-back, exhausting them, and only then petitioning the City Commission for approval to continue. The Commission approval didn’t extend the existing permits — it enabled a new round of permitting under modified terms.

After Commission approval, each new permit was valid for 10 days rather than seven. That meant resubmission on a rolling basis for the duration of the exhibition’s entire run.

By the time the exhibition closed in June, the team had secured and managed 12 special event permits in total.

Knowing the rules before you need them — and planning around them from the start — is what kept this exhibition running without a single day of interruption.

Miami vs. Miami Beach: Two Very Different Permitting Realities

One of the more nuanced realities of this engagement was navigating the difference between how the City of Miami and the City of Miami Beach handle special event permitting. It’s a distinction that matters enormously for anyone producing events in South Florida.

In Miami, a special event permit is technically issued on the day the event passes its final inspections. That means the entire load-in period happens before a permit is formally in hand. Structures go up. Sidewalks get closed. Work is actively underway — all without a formally issued permit. The system functions because of established relationships and institutional trust between experienced operators and the city.

“In Miami, you get your special event permit issued the day you pass inspections. So the whole load-in — I’m technically without a permit. It’s backwards. I’d love to get my permit before we start loading in. But then you’d have to remove the requirement that the building permit has to be issued first.”

— Suzette Tillit, Special Events Director, East of Collins Expediting

Miami Beach operates differently. There, all permits must be issued before load-in begins. The responsibility is shifted to the special inspector and engineer of record, rather than the city.

Both cities are navigable. But they require different strategies — and operators who treat them as interchangeable are the ones who find themselves in trouble.

What This Kind of Work Actually Requires

The Dolce&Gabbana exhibition was a first for East of Collins Expediting in one specific way: it was the first time Suzette had taken a special event engagement all the way through City Commission for a permit extension approval.

The process — researching the right timing, building the relationship with the Special Events Director in advance, understanding exactly when to appear before the Commission — required institutional knowledge that doesn’t come from a manual. It comes from having the right people in the room before you need them.

The Bigger Point: Not Every Event Is a Weekend

Most event operators in South Florida are built for the short format — a Saturday activation, a one-night gala, a three-day festival. The permitting infrastructure for those events is well-understood and relatively predictable.

Long-format events — exhibitions, installations, residencies, activations that run weeks or months — live in a different layer of the permitting process. The rules are the same, but the strategy is different. The relationship with the city is different. The timing of every submission is different.

And the cost of a misstep — a gap in coverage, a missed Commission deadline, a permit that expires before the next one is issued — is measured not in inconvenience but in operational shutdown.

East of Collins Expediting has done both. We understand the difference. For organizations planning ambitious, long-term events in Miami or Miami Beach — the kind that require a permitting team that stays engaged for months, not days — that experience is exactly what we bring to the table.

Twelve permits. One exhibition. No gaps. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to — regardless of how long the event runs.