9 Momentous Meetings Between Art and Fashion
The relationship between fashion and art hasn’t always been an easy one. The two may appear to be natural bedfellows, but the greatest of love affairs often rests on the shakiest of foundations. All but the boldest of designers baulks at describing themselves as an ‘artist’, whether or not their dedication to craft and concept warrants the title, whilst the ‘proper’ artist lending their vision to something with sleeves, straps or shoelaces still risks scoffs, scorn and slurs. Selling out? Cashing in? Or, quite simply, making magic? Here are nine times the boldest and bravest brought fashion and art together - and created something infinitely greater than the sum of its parts in the process.
Elsa Schiaparelli x Salvador Dalí
Elsa Schiaparelli’s Dadaist associations and intuitive approach to the business of couture prompted Gabrielle Chanel to describe her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes”. Unlike her contemporary, who took a proudly punctilious approach to her craft, Schiaparelli could boast no formal technical training in either pattern making or clothing construction, opting to rely on impulse and serendipity. Whilst the dressmaker collaborated with several of the Parisian Surrealists, including Jean Cocteau, it was her work with Salvador Dalí, from summer 1937’s infamous lobster dress - included in Wallis Simpson’s bridal trousseau - to autumn’s shoe hat, that really caught the public’s imagination.
Schiaparelli’s 1938 ‘Circus’ show, in which models sported clown hats and carried balloon-shaped handbags, has been described as the first fusion of fashion show with performance art. The collection included the so-called ‘tears dress’, a further product of her professional partnership with Dalí. Its print, suggestive of the ripped clothing and flayed flesh alluded to in the painter’s ‘Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra’ has been described as a ‘mourning dress’ heralding the dawning of the second world war.
Cecil Beaton x Jackson Pollock
Under the artistic direction of Alexander Liberman, American Vogue had become an important showcase for modern art, but never had the collision between the worlds of art and fashion been presented in so striking a manner as in Cecil Beaton’s March 1951 editorial, ‘American Fashion: The Soft New Look’. Immaculately coiffed models sheathed in haute couture Henri Bendel gowns posed against the backdrop of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings. Pollock, who created the works by pouring or flinging house paint directly onto canvas, assisted only by a stick, had said of them, “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old form of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”
The images have prompted more than half a century of debate amongst critics. Änne Söll argues that Beaton’s “clearly European gaze instrumentalises Pollock's paintings for his own purposes and highlights the long-lasting ideological conflict between European design and American identity,” whilst Paul Mattick asserts that “their elegant composition brings into juxtaposition a set of polar categories that have been used to talk about art throughout the modern period: avant-garde and fashion, abstraction and representation, autonomy and decoration, painting and photography, production and consumption, masculinity and femininity, art and commerce.”
Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian Collection
Though Yves Saint Laurent’s Fall 1965 ‘Mondrian Collection’ was influenced by artists including Serge Poliakoff and Kazimir Malevich, it was the colour blocked A-line shift dresses inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian which garnered global attention. His translations of Mondrian’s “purity in painting” to the iconic ‘60s sack shift silhouette reflected a masterstroke in couture technique: each of the six seemingly seam-free silk crepe and wool jersey dresses was constructed from individual pieces of pre-dyed fabric.
Cheap mass-produced copies soon flooded the market, but the original collection is still considered one of fashion’s most important artistic breakthroughs, and credited with changing the face of haute couture.
Sonia Delaunay’s Simultaneous Dresses
"All [my] works were made for women, and all were constructed in relation to the body. They were not copies of paintings transposed on to women's bodies, as one couturier has done with Mondrian and Pop Art… I find all that completely ridiculous. It's a promotional medium, but it isn't a basis for either development or construction: it's a circus,” Sonia Delaunay proclaimed in 1968. The artist herself prided herself on the creation of her ‘simultaneous’ dresses, designed to accentuate the sway and movement of the human body. Inspired by the strand of Orphism she had previously practised on canvas, Delaunay’s approach to Simultanism applied the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast (in which colours appear different depending on the colours surrounding them) to evoke rhythm, motion and depth. “Colour is the skin of the world,” she declared.
Viewed within the context of Delaunay’s seven decade career, her simultaneous designs constitute a relatively minor proportion of the consummate artist-couturier’s prodigious output, which also included Vogue cover illustrations, Surrealist ‘dress poems’, Ballets Russes costume designs and an unprecedented foray into fashion film.
The Souper Dress
In a truly inspired move by the marketeers behind Campbell’s Soup Company, the brand managed to turn the art-from-commerce modus of Pop Art on its head by charging ‘60s hipsters a dollar (and two soup can labels) for a paper dress inspired by Andy Warhol’s ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’. Produced throughout the late ‘60s, the screen printed dress, 80% cellulose and 20% cotton, was available in three sizes and advertised as ‘flame resistant unless previously washed or cleaned’.
Examples have been known to sell for several thousand pounds at auction, with one currently on display at the Victoria & Albert museum as part of You Say You Want A Revolution? Records & Rebels 1966-1970.
Scenario
Rei Kawakubo’s designs for 1997 ballet ‘Scenario’ provided choreographer Merce Cunningham with the catalyst with which to turn dance into experimental art. Inspired by her ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’ collection for Comme Des Garçons (also known as ‘the lumps and bumps show’), the dancers’ costumes were ‘deformed’ by bulging, down-filled protrusions. “Fashion was very boring, and I was very angry. I wanted to do something extremely strong. It was a reaction. The feeling was to design the body,” Kawakubo revealed of her original inspiration.
Cunningham, known for his experimental, ‘chance-driven’ choreography, and his company worked independently of Kawakubo until the performance. The performance itself thus hinged heavily on aspects of chance, the dancers’ movements contingent on the ways in which they responded to the limitations imposed on their movements, vision and balance by the costumes.
Dress No. 13
Alexander McQueen, arguably responsible for redefining the fashion show as performance art, took things a step further with the finale of his Spring/Summer 1999 show, inspired by a Rebecca Horn installation. As Shalom Harlow stepped onto a rotating platform, clad in a strapless white gown, two robots began to spray her with paint, creating a unique (and priceless) work of art before showgoers’ eyes.
“Alexander and I didn’t have any conversation directly related to this particular piece and to creating this moment within his show. I like to think that he wanted to interfere as little as possible and allow me to have the most genuine, spontaneous experience possible,” Harlow recalls. “It almost became this like aggressive sexual experience in some way. And I think that this moment really encapsulates, in a way, how Alexander related to—at least at this particular moment—related to creation.”
Viktor & Rolf’s ‘Wearable Art’
Viktor & Rolf’s AW15 haute couture show took the concept of ‘Wearable Art’ to an entirely new level. Models took to the runway clad in skirts, dresses and coats fashioned from Golden Age-inspired painted canvases (complete with frames). No sooner had each struck her final pose than the designers themselves were upon her to quietly, swiftly and efficiently unfasten and re-hang their artworks, two performance artists curating an installation before their audience’s very eyes. "Art comes to life in a gallery of surreal proportions," the show notes confirmed. "A dress transforms into an artwork, back into a dress and into an artwork again. Poetry becomes reality, morphing back into fantasy.”
Combining trompe-l'œil techniques and “the rawness and spontaneity of action painting” with “a complex layering of laser-cut jacquards, embroideries and appliqués”, the duo combined artistry with haute couture to unprecedented effect.
Rick Owens SS16
Owens has described the infamous ‘human backpacks’ which dominated his Spring/Summer 2016 show as “sculptural compositions”. The show may have been dismissed as a publicity stunt by the masses, but first hand witnesses talked only of its power. Owens’ pairs of women were bound by what the designer termed “loving ribbons”, representing “nourishment, sisterhood, motherhood and regeneration; women raising women; women becoming women; women supporting other women.” Astute showgoers, meanwhile, pointed to the double-edged sword of binding yourself to another: providing support can prove burdensome.
Demonstrating the power of clothing to provoke reflections which penetrate far beyond its layers, in an era portending the fashion show’s imminent demise, Owens continues to make his unequivocally unmissable.
Words: Samantha Simmonds
This piece was originally featured in After Nyne Magazine Issue 11. Available to download from the Store at afternyne.com
