The debate about considering fashion as art has been going on for decades and in the past we have seen not just fashion designers taking inspiration from art, but also people working in different branches of the fashion industry, such as textile and yarn designers.
But if fashion can be arty, can art be fashionable? Well, nowadays we have grown accustomed to seeing all sorts of collaborations between artists and fashion houses, but, in the history of art, there have been artists who actually moved from textile based materials to create their paintings.
Vincent Van Gogh, for example, studied a lot of books about colour theory that allowed him to discover how red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange intensify one another. Yet, he also had another method for studying colours.
At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you can still see a red lacquer box that contains several little balls of coloured wool yarns.
Van Gogh used indeed threads of wool in various hues to test different colour combinations that could produce powerful effects, or variations of a single colour, before trying them out with expensive paints.
Yarns allowed him to play with intense colour contrasts and to create paintings such as "Grapes" (1887).
The colour of the two types of grapes are set off against strokes of paint in contrasting hues: blue against yellow and green against red.
A year later, in 1888, Van Gogh wrote "… the painter of the future is a colourist such as there hasn't been before."
Who knows, maybe in the next decade we will see more artists moving for fashion to take inspiration for the colours in their paintings or yarn designers launching threads inspired by Van Gogh's colourful wool balls.
Comments