As seen in the previous post, guessing which trends borrowed from the past may become popular this year or in the next decade may not be so easy. That said, there are certain trends that have been established in the last few years and that are here to stay. Among them there is, for example, the connection between art and fashion.
Fashionistas may remember how in 2017 Dior launched the Lady Art project that consists in commissioning to artists and creative minds limited editions of the iconic Lady Dior handbag. At the end of last year the brand's creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri continued the tradition by inviting 11 contemporary artists to reinvent the bag that will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
The latest bags were launched in December in Miami during Art Basel when Dior unveiled the collaboration. Each artist involved recreated and redesigned the Lady Dior bag in a unique way, but it is in some ways possible to divide them in groups, according to the media and technique they employed.
Painting was the main media for three of the artists involved for example: Indian-born but London-based Raqib Shaw was inspired by melancholia and beauty and recreated a tree - a detail from his "Paradise Lost" series - on leather, accessorising the bag with enamelled charms.
Moving from Christian Dior's passion for flowers, Korean Jia Lee created delicate painted flowers, that were then rendered three-dimensionally in silk, on the bags to give the idea of gifting not just a bag, but a floral bouquet.
Chinese abstract painter Wang Guangle moved from the traditions of his hometown, Fujian. Here elderly people usually get a coffin when they feel they may be passing away soon.
If they don't die, they paint the coffin and they keep on painting it again and again, year after year, until they die. The stratification of colours formed on the bag evokes this act of painting and repainting the coffin.
Other artists worked with hand-sewn elements appliqued on the bag to give the accessory an added tactile quality: Indian-born but New York-based Rina Banerjee often incorporates natural elements in her large-scale sculptures and installations, so in this case she came up with a sun-shaped protective eye made of glass beads, cowrie shells and feathers.
While Maria Nepomuceno created floral beaded organisms that extend on the bag like tentacles, Mickalene Thomas was inspired by Claude Monet's Giverny gardens and came up with a dense collage forming a portable landscape.
Athi-Patra Ruga, who studied fashion design at the Gordon Flack Davison Academy of Design in Johannesburg in his native South Africa, usually produces performances, videos, textile-based works and prints.
For this occasion he designed a bag characterised by a series of colourful scallops inspired by the Junon dress and another handbag with a three-dimensional pearl portrait integrating colourful crystals and fabric.
Architect Eduardo Terrazas, a pioneer in contemporary Mexican art, is well-known as the co-designer of the logo and prevalent design elements for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Traced in concentric circles, the logo was inspired by Huichol techniques, and helped him defining his visual language, a code made of geometric shapes.
Terrazas conceived the bag like the façade of a building, and incorporated in it a series of elements, lines and colours lifted from his early drawings from 1974 and again inspired by geometry and American Indian Huichol techniques.
Some of the artists included in the project combined technology and traditions: French Marguerite Humeau designed a white ghost-like 3D printed bag made from rigid corn resin that looks as solid as a sculpture but it is made with a sort of draped effect that gives you the illusion of looking at a fabric. The bag was inspired by an alabaster and rock crystal funeral urn the artist saw at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Portuguese Joana Vasconcelos opted for a simple red heart on a black bag to evoke peace, love, the curved Viana heart (an iconic image in Portugal) and Diana, Princess of Wales, also known as the Princess of Hearts. The heart was turned into a vibrant motif thanks to the integration in the bag of LED lights.
Osaka-born, Kyoto-based artist Kohei Nawa explored the relationship between substance and life via his "Biomatrix" bags, a name taken from his eponymous 2018 installation.
The latter consisted in a visually striking grid formation of cell bubbles emerging on the surface of liquid silicone oil evoking the behaviour of magma or blood.
The artist managed to recreate the same effect on the surface of the bag using silicon oil and transparent film and conceived the design as a portable vision of the cycle of life.
While not many of us may be able to afford the handbags that will be out in January in store and online and will be sold at prices ranging from $4,000 to $14,000 (Vasconcelos' bag is already available online and will set you back $6,300), such collaborations and fashion and art crossovers can still be intriguing as they help artists to introduce their work to a wider audience, but they also allow the artists to collaborate with ateliers and workshops that can translate their works and inspiration into unique fashion designs.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.