11 Designers Who Have Proven That Yes, Fashion Can Be Art
Is fashion art? It’s a conversation you could go round the houses with – and people often do. Naysayers will argue that fashion’s inherently commercial, product-centred focus, seasonal fickleness and reliance on the human body to acquire its meaning (rather than hold its own as an object) disqualifies fashion from being perceived in the same regard as fine art. If the dress code of the upcoming Met Gala is anything to go by, though, the answer is that it damn well is!
Our stance is, of course, somewhat biased, but looking back across the annals of fashion history, there are just so many moments where fashion has presented itself with a critical self-awareness and sense of autonomous objecthood that rivals many revered contemporary art practices.
That’s not to say that all fashion can (or should) be appraised in line with the same criteria that we typically reserve for art, mind you. In certain cases, though, donning a curator’s cap and looking back on seminal fashion history moments through a more art historical lens illuminates not just how fab certain moments were of their own accord, but how significantly they’ve shaped the contours of just fashion, and culture at large. Here are some of the key fashion creators behind them.
WWD/Getty Images1/11Elsa Schiaparelli
In many ways, there is no greater example of society minimising the artistic and cultural weight of fashion than the work of Elsa Schiaparelli. Despite being embedded with the Surrealist movement during the interwar period – collaborating closely with artists such as Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau – the very medium Schiaparelli was working in meant her work was considered a lesser form of artistic expression and, often, a mere commodity. Yet, for a movement so preoccupied with the female form and subverting the everyday, Schiaparelli’s work – such as the Shoe Hat and Skeleton Dress – arguably went further than most in this mission, escaping the confines of the gallery and sparking real conversation. Joy Montgomery, shopping editor
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Yves Saint Laurent
There are few collections that blurred the boundaries of fashion and art quite like Yves Saint Laurent autumn/winter 1965, in which around a quarter of the looks drew direct inspiration from the paintings of Dutch De Stijl pioneer Piet Mondrian. The most emblematic, of course, remains the ’60s sack dresses – cropped, geometric silhouettes that served as the perfect canvas for the primary-hued blocks from which the dresses were composed, their seams and shaping details artfully hidden in the sharp black borders. The collection marked a major turning point in the recontextualisation of artworks as wearable items, proving that a garment can resonate with the same resonance as a painting. They also inspired a bevvy of cheap knock-offs, proving how far back appetite for art-skewing fashion extends.
Sean Thomas3/11Gianni Versace
Fashion’s inherent consumerist spirit, predilection for celebrity and status as a key engine of contemporary image culture naturally aligns it with the conceptual premises of Pop Art. That much has been known since the movement’s earliest days – Andy Warhol, for one, had a longstanding formal and social relationship to fashion, working as an illustrator for this very magazine in the ’50s. There’s also Interview, the magazine he founded, that continues to be a key fixture of the modern fashion media landscape to this day. Anyway, in 1991, Gianni Versace paid homage to the artist with a dress immediately canonised in pop cultural history – an evening dress splashed in a lairy print collaged from Warhol’s immortal images of Marilyn Monroe. From a designer with such a shrewd understanding of fashion’s burgeoning pop appeal, this felt like a knowing nod to – and invocation of – a time just decades prior when fine art held similar cultural cachet.
Spotlight/Launchmetrics4/11Rei Kawakubo
Flicking through Comme des Garçons’s back catalogue is an art history lesson in itself. From the brand’s ’90s Cindy Sherman campaigns to the deliciously esoteric cult magazine, Six, the brand’s approach to creating and communicating fashion has been unorthodox to the point of being more easily read as a conceptual art practice since its inception in the ’70s. If I were to credit any single moment in fashion with putting me on the path to the seat on which I write to you now, though, it would be Rei Kawakubo’s spring/summer 1997 collection, “Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress”.
I can’t remember where, exactly, I first saw a picture of the collection’s tumescent scarlet and gingham dresses. What I do recall, though, is a feeling close to rapture. The almost-leery sexuality of clingy scarlet fabric clashed with the trite domesticity of gingham. Backs, breasts and hips obscured by lumps and bumps (as the collection has colloquially come to be known) of wadding that pushed past the pornographic into something more uncanny and sinister… it felt like a clear, concise, ultimately chilling baring out of the embodied paradoxes of modern femininity – and fashion’s inherent role in stoking them. The draped scarlet look, with the infant-like lump swaddled across the chest, the fabric binding the model’s upper arms, is one I think of regularly, and has shaped my perceptions as much as any formally recognised artwork has.
Marcio Madeira/Style.com5/11Martin Margiela
Now, there wouldn’t be much cause for this list without Martin Margiela. Reviewing an exhibition of the artist and designer’s at a major French institution, a friend of mine – a prominent critic who also works between fashion and art – described a takedown he’d penned as a pseudo-Oedipal act of “killing the father”. Indeed, pretty much all conceptually-skewed fashion practices since the ’90s owe something of a debt to Margiela. From shows staged in children’s playgrounds in Parisian banlieues, to couture crafted from the same linen used on Stockman busts, to (my favourite) presenting white garments along with ephemeral, pink dyed ice-cube jewellery, which melted over the show’s course to stain the models’ clothes, Margiela consistently reassessed – and playfully ribbed – conventional understandings of what constitutes luxury, proposing clothes that instigated reflections on, and often undermined, fashion’s most basic premises.
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Alexander McQueen
The term “performance art” gets thrown about a fair amount in fashion writing – it’s short hand for a show that does something a little more daring than sending models down a runway in single file. A designer whose shows warranted the term’s use, though, was, of course, Lee Alexander McQueen. Think: the haunting spectacle of Kate Moss staggering about the boxed-in set of “Voss”; the immortal image of Shalom Harlow, swirling in seeming torment as her layered tulle gown was sprayed with paint-loaded robotic arms; and models lurching around a Borough Market warehouse, silhouettes flickering in the light of a burning car. McQueen’s capacity for building environments and staging spectacles that viscerally struck at the heart of what it means to be human – often at its most sinister, sensual and raw – stands him apart as a true artist, irrespective of medium or genre.
Courtesy Louis Vuitton.7/11Marc Jacobs
Few have brought art to the forefront of the fashion discourse quite like Marc Jacobs did during his 16-year tenure at Louis Vuitton. A pioneer of the luxury brand and artist collaboration, Jacobs brought the poppy, lysergic visual worlds of the likes of Stephen Sprouse, Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami to the masses – beyond these agenda-setting collaborations, which were instrumental in transforming Louis Vuitton from the traditional French trunk house it was into the cultural behemoth it is today, Jacobs also worked with the likes of Frank Gehry, Cindy Sherman and Rei Kawakubo on more sculptural objets as part of the house’s 2014 Iconoclasts project, opening the door to more serious object-centred collaborations between fashion brands and fine artists.
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Shayne Oliver
New York’s history as a home of collectives that have intentionally blurred the boundaries of fashion and art is unparalleled. In the past decade or so, perhaps the most renegade in doing so was Shayne Oliver, the founder of the cultishly adored Hood By Air. What made HBA’s proposal so distinct was its experimental means of pushing fashion beyond its familiar remit – shows transported editors to Brooklyn ballrooms at a time when ballroom was still perceived as a decidedly underground genre; artists like Juliana Huxtable and Wolfgang Tillmans appeared on the brands runways at a time when such cameos were still pretty unheard of; and in 2016, the brand even paired up with PornHub, a daring marketing tactic that, in hindsight, was a watershed moment in the brokering of the concertedly viral partnerships that have shaped fashion culture since. Few have done it quite like Shayne Oliver.
John Lamparski9/11Telfar Clemens
The presence of fashion brands at major art exhibitions and fairs is nothing new – nor was it in 2016. What was, however, pretty novel was the presentation of fashion merchandising by a fashion brand as a fine art proposal in itself. That’s exactly what Telfar, the indie New York label, did at the Berlin Biennale that year, presenting a series of uncanny mannequins made in the designer’s likeness – and dressed in the brand’s concertedly off-kilter riffs on everyday wear – alongside Hito Steyerl and Jon Rafman video installations. Curated by DIS, the art collective founded by a clique of jobbing fashion professionals (including the now prolific image-making duo Torso), the installation underscored the uncanniness, artificiality and sense of performance embedded in commercial fashion, and the narratives we all engage with on a daily basis. MS
Photo by Virgil Claisse/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images10/11Jonathan Anderson
Jonathan Anderson’s profound relationship to art is well-documented – he is an esteemed patron and collector, and in recent years has curated exhibitions at major London galleries. For a significant period of his tenure at Loewe, though, art became more than an inspiration for his shows – it was a centrepiece, his showspaces transformed into ephemeral institutional-scale exhibitions. Choosing just one example is a challenge, but his Loewe men’s AW24 show stands out. With a set built to resemble a chapel, its stained glass windows were swapped out for playfully naïve yet slyly sleazy collages and video installations by American artist Richard Hawkins, the latter featuring Loewe’s roster of red-hot male talent posing in a style that sat somewhere between cam-boy and martyred saint. A pithy visual sermon on the modern-day cult of voyeurism (and exhibitionism) in our digital age, it was a perfect example of gallery-calibre commentary transposed into the fashion space. The collection was pretty great, too.
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Sinéad O’Dwyer
Fashion school graduate shows are natural contexts for work more easily contextualised as art. For one thing, most departments sit within – or at least in close dialogue with – art schools, leading to a natural cross-pollination of creative genres and their conceptual premises. London’s Royal College of Art is one such example, its 2017 MA graduate show being a particular standout. Among the most memorable was the work of Irish-born, London-based Sinéad O’Dwyer. Posing like figures in a pre-Raphaelite fresco, a size and ability-diverse group of models wore sculptural pieces moulded from the bodies of two of the designer’s muses, rendered in extruded silicone with gathers of satin frozen in the jelly-like matter. These were more sculpture than garment – they weren’t pieces that could be easily reproduced (or worn, for that matter), but the presentation was a key moment in bringing the conversation around the acceptance and presentation of real women’s bodies in fashion – or rather the dire lack of it – to the fore, a conversation that the designer continues to keep at the heart of her practice to date.
