Ever since Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí’s famous lobster dress, fashion designers and artists have pooled their creativity—Luxury Defined takes a look at art and fashion’s enduring love affair
A fashion designer needs to be a voracious collector and hoarder of ideas, with a magpie’s roving eye. He or she can take inspiration from pretty much anything—from a butterfly’s wing to a tornado; from an Egyptian goddess to a political placard at a demonstration. Yet what gets fashion designers’ creative juices flowing more than anything is the dazzle and visual punch of art.
When he was creative director of Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs once opened a fashion show with 12 models, among them Naomi Campbell, dressed as the subjects of Richard Prince’s Nurses paintings, right down to their medical masks. Each woman carried a Vuitton monogrammed handbag printed with text from Prince’s Monochromatic Jokes painting series. What were the gathered fashion editors watching? Was this a copy of Prince’s work, an extension, or an homage?
In our visually saturated world, fashion and art “brands” can mutually benefit from such creative bonding. For the artist it’s the crossover exposure and online reach, while the designer is temporarily bathed in the gravitas of the artist’s high-culture aura. It often feels like a win, win.
“If you have a good eye, whatever you do in collaboration looks exciting,” says Simon Costin, the set designer who famously worked with Alexander McQueen on his most groundbreaking early fashion shows. Yet according to Costin, the fashion and art worlds are distinct. “I was once asked if Alexander McQueen was a true artist. I said, no, he was a genius fashion designer. And that’s enough. Fine art functions in a very different way—it moves much slower. Whereas fashion is instant and is all about now.”
Alexander McQueen was a genius fashion designer. And that’s enough. Fine art functions in a very different way
McQueen’s is the name most linked to the designer-as-artist idea. In a show called Voss, he recreated a disturbing image by the American artist Joel-Peter Witkin, Sanitarium (1983). Presented in a one-way mirrored box like a padded asylum, the presentation climaxed with a naked reclining woman wearing a winged face mask connected to a breathing device as large, papery moths flew around her.
Surely this was more performance art than fashion show? It was precisely this kind of ambiguity that gave many of McQueen’s fashion shows their startling visceral impact. “A truly shocking, enthralling tableau,” reported Vogue magazine when the lights had dimmed.
“I grew up watching McQueen’s incredible shows,” says Stephan Alexander, director of the Ghost Gallery in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. “In many ways they inspired me to do what I do now.” It’s the visual spectacles that lead Alexander to see fashion and art as seamlessly linked.
“Technology is driving the connection between fashion and art more than anything else,” he says. “Instagram has moved things on the most. It helps fashion designers and artists check in on each other’s work as smoothly as scrolling through text—everything is delivered so fast now.”
Andrew Bolton, chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, isn’t one to trouble himself over the difference between art and fashion either. “The art world sees fashion as something that is deeply rooted in the commercial world, not in the art world,” he said in a recent interview. “And the popularity of fashion can be annoying to some people—they don’t like that it brings in such huge numbers. But the reason why it does is that it’s a living art form we can all relate to.”
The extravagant, celeb-drenched Met Gala launches Bolton’s annual themed show. By drawing such large fee-paying crowds it is an important contributor to the Met Museum’s bottom line. For instance, the 2015 show, China: Through the Looking Glass, raised $12.5 million and drew crowds of more than 800,000 to the museum in the four months the exhibition ran. The Met may be a museum of high art and design, but the commercial clout of fashion will never worry the museum’s accountants.
Sometimes an artist’s work subtly inspires a fashion collection. When Belgian minimalist designer Raf Simons created his first couture collection for Christian Dior he repurposed the paintings of his friend, the artist and former skateboarder Sterling Ruby. These were copied onto silk to make dresses and skirts that glowed with streaks of the artist’s rich, painterly color.
The popularity of fashion can be annoying to some people—they don’t like that it brings in such huge numbers. But the reason why it does is that it’s a living art form we can all relate to
Simons and Ruby collaborated again when the designer took over Calvin Klein as creative director in 2016. Simons asked Ruby to overhaul the brand’s minimalist Madison Avenue flagship store designed by British architect John Pawson. Given a free rein, the artist painted every surface acid yellow and installed scaffolding on which to hang the collection. It was a radical departure from Calvin Klein’s low-key neutral palette.
“I want the new store to glow from within,” said Ruby, “representing a new day for Calvin Klein.” Surprisingly, however, their collaboration didn’t pay off. Simons’s contract with Calvin Klein ended abruptly at the end of 2018, when the label’s owner decided to stop presenting catwalk collections altogether to focus on jeans, underwear, and fragrance.
Fashion commentators like Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic of The New York Times, felt Simons had turned this quintessential American label into something too high-concept. Too artsy, in fact. The lesson seems to be that if a designer becomes overly enthralled with art they risk losing sight of the grueling commercial demands of the six-month fashion cycle.
This is an accusation that is unlikely ever to be leveled at one of the biggest names in men’s fashion right now: Kim Jones, artistic director at Dior Homme (and former artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton) who likes nothing more than to work with artists. Jones showed his pre-Fall 2019 menswear presentation in Tokyo where he commissioned the Japanese sculptor Hajime Sorayama to make a towering, 39-foot (12 m), buxom aluminum robot woman who stood center stage as his sport-luxe attired models marched around her like minions.
Meanwhile, Virgil Abloh, men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton, has side-stepped the issue by blurring the lines between artist and designer completely. With more than 4 million Instagram followers and the ability to move smoothly between design, fashion, and club culture, Abloh is as much a brand himself as any company he works with. He has his own fashion label Off-White; he has designed rugs for IKEA and he DJs in the best nightclubs. He has even designed record covers for Kanye West.
It should come as no surprise then that this summer Abloh’s work was given a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago called Figures of Speech. “Virgil is the type of creator who would devour everything around him and turn it into his nourishment,” Japanese artist Takashi Murakami once said, defending the right of a designer to have his work displayed in a museum of art. When we are all magpies absorbing images at breakneck speed, Abloh is a perfect embodiment of the artist/designer for our digital age.
