The number of fashion designers referencing specific works of art or collaborating with modern artists grows season after season. Raf Simons incorporated collages by Los Angeles-based visual artist Sterling Ruby in his A/W 2014 menswear collection, turning them into oversized and voluminous trenches and coats; Proenza Schouler used as starting point for their A/W 2014 womenswear collection a representative of the California Clay Movement, Ron Nagle; Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino opted for Giosetta Fioroni, the only woman in the so-called Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, a group of Italian Pop-oriented artists from the '60s; Burberry Prorsum's Christopher Bailey turned to the Bloomsbury Group, Guillaume Henry at Carven paid homage to the Dadaists and Jean Pierre Braganza sent out garments with prints of Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.
And let's avoid mentioning the arty accessories, that include shoes with Cubist (instead of Cuban...) heels and arty canvas rucksacks or clutch bags in the shape of art portfolios. In a nutshell, the next time you go out shopping you may need to ask not your best friend but an art critic to accompany you, while at the next major art fair or biennale you may end up spotting more fashion designers than at a glamorous fashion show.
But is this a genuine will to rediscover art or just a quick way out and why has this cross-pollination between art and fashion become so strong in the last few seasons? Besides, when did it all start?
Fashion and art started a serious flirt in the '90s. First we had a series of artists who showed an interest in the fashion industry because this medium has a more immediate power and can reach out to a wider audience compared to art. Around the same period of time, the fashion industry financially hit a boom phase and this meant that it became possible for it to provide sources that could be employed for art purposes. The fashion industry also started getting interested in the art world because, in the society of the spectacle, very strong visual images infiltrate the media in a much more effective way, and fashion tried to assume from the art world its capacity to create effectively experimental and radically rebellious images that could help selling specific products on the mass market.
If you want to know more about this story, Russian speakers can check out the piece about art and fashion I wrote for the April issue of Ural-based magazine WTF (What's The Fashion?), a publication for design, architecture and fashion fans. If you instead want to bring back some genuine joie de vivre into fashion and art just go out in a dirty T-shirt covered in blotches and stains, and, if somebody ever questions your look, just explain them you're trying to channel Jackson Pollock. Now THAT would be a truly visionary art and fashion connection...
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