Can fashion ever be art?
Although I did search it over with no results, I find it strange that there isn't a thread on this already.... If so, please feel free to remove this...
Pretty as a picture
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]
It's useful. Sometimes it's even beautiful. But can fashion ever be art?[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]
Hadley Freeman
Monday November 6, 2006
The Guardian
[/FONT]
In 1936, the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli slapped a surrealist lobster by Salvador Dalí on to one of her dresses and pronounced it a work of art. It caused a sensation - and has had people chewing over the question of whether fashion can be art ever since. Seventy years on, the consensus seems to be that it can, and the lobster has triumphed.
This year, there are more fashion exhibitions opening around the world than ever before. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is currently showcasing Christian Lacroix's oeuvre as part of its Fashion in Motion series. The Balenciaga retrospective on show at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris has been one of the city's most popular exhibitions this summer, perhaps because the brand's designer, Nicholas Ghesquière, has managed to stay true to the label's original, mid-20th-century look, while cleverly updating it for the likes of fans such as Chloë Sevigny. Meanwhile, the Giorgio Armani behemoth, which has only just finished its six-year world tour, appears to have taken tips from the designer's new best mate, Bono, when it comes to international appearances, costs and publicity. Even Kylie Minogue's wardrobe is getting an exhibition next year, at the V&A, with the dungarees she wore to fix the Robinsons' car in Neighbours cited as "cultural icons".
All these dusty rooms filled with po-faced, albeit impeccably dressed mannequins would suggest the debate is won: fashion is art and the greatest designers are up there with Picasso and Warhol. But do clothes really belong in a museum? On the one hand, fashion pretty much fulfils two of the chief requirements of a good piece of art - exceptional technical skill and the evocation of a certain period; on these grounds, it seems perfectly reasonable for modern clothes to be displayed in galleries. In fact, some designers are best seen this way: Hussein Chalayan's clothes, for instance, which put more emphasis on technique than practicalities. The collection he showed in Paris last month was a case in point, featuring dresses with hemlines that mechanically rose up and down.
Yet applauding a designer for making a clever dress smacks of giving a standing ovation to a plumber who knows how to tweak your pipes. Why the fuss? For my money, fashion earns its place in a museum only when the clothes are put in their proper context. Recent retrospectives of Gianni Versace and Vivienne Westwood at the V&A put the emphasis on the craft rather than their historical moment - and this in spite of the fact that both designers are identified with particular eras, the 80s and the 70s respectively, and played as big a part as any artist in the shaping of each decade's aesthetic.
In this respect, at least, the Anglomania exhibition that opened in New York this spring was probably the most successful museum fashion show ever. A celebration of British designers past and present, it put every piece of clothing in context and showed how British designers have simultaneously followed and rebelled against tradition. Frocks were shown alongside paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds, whose 18th-century subjects often looked as if they had been dressed by Vivienne Westwood, only without the safety pins and ripped-up Union flags.
The worlds of fashion and art are increasingly intertwined. Whether it's Sam Taylor-Wood trumpeting her love of Alexander McQueen, or Burberry providing the sponsorship for the David Hockney exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the two are incapable of keeping their hands off each other - like Kate Moss and self-described "blood-artist" Pete Doherty. In 2005, Hussein Chalayan showed a short film starring Tilda Swinton at the Venice Biennale, while Karl Lagerfeld owns a particularly self-important art book and magazine shop in Paris called 7L. Miuccia Prada is considered a major player in the art world since setting up the Fondazione Prada, which has become a respected collector of art.
The mutual appeal is obvious. But it doesn't make fashion art, and it's when designers start striving for artistic credibility that a toxic cloud of tedium descends. The best way to cure a shopping addiction is to go to a Bond Street shop with an in-store "art display", full of shopping assistants dressed in funereal black, barking on about this season's "concept".
In her 1954 autobiography, Elsa Schiaparelli sighed happily: "One felt supported and understood [in the art world] beyond the crude and boring reality of merely making dresses to sell." And there we have it, the very point that makes one's eyes roll to the heavens. Of course fashion has an aesthetic side, but without its practical purpose it serves absolutely no point whatsoever. For a designer to make, say, a dress that pays beautiful homage to Mark Rothko's stripes but is worn by no one because few wish to look like a blue and purple Michelin man, is about as annoying as a doctor who can't make you feel better but can make amazing shapes with his stethoscope. Making clothes for people to wear may be "crude and boring", but it is, as Schiaparelli concedes, "reality".
This is not to say that designers should make black trousers and plain polonecks, and nothing else. As anyone who has ever grappled with a p*ssy bow or struggled to keep the fringes on their boots out of a puddle knows, it is a rare garment that is made solely with functionality in mind, and it would be a far duller world if that were the case. What designers shouldn't do, however, is allow the concept of practicality, or any thought for the potential wearer, to sail out the window. Nor should they use the label of "art" as self-justification. It's a mark of insecurity, an attempt to give gravity to a profession they feel it might otherwise lack. As Bella Freud, a designer who can make better claims than most to have experience of both worlds, says: "Whenever people talk about fashion as art, it suggests that fashion is not good enough unless it is art. Clothes are so good on their own and they have a function. When people start talking about them as art, it just makes them boring." Similarly, Karl Lagerfeld, who seems to siphon his artistic pretensions away from his fashion and into his bookshop, complained in an article in ArtReview in 2003: "If you are an artist, you do your job; you don't have to turn to another department to be taken seriously. It is like an excuse - that fashion is nothing . . . Fashion people have complexes they shouldn't have."
But if the fashion world looks to art for added elitism, art - or at least, the gallery world - looks to fashion for mass appeal. When asked about the art world's interest in fashion, Marc Rappolt and Skye Sherwin, the editor and deputy editor of ArtReview, bluntly tick off the reasons: "Money, sponsorship, popular appeal. Art currently wants, more than anything else, to be part of popular culture. Fashion wants more than anything else to be taken seriously. Each thinks it gets what it really wants in this kind of exchange. Unfortunately, as with many blind dates, both parties come away looking a little foolish."
Perhaps they just go too far in trying to justify their presence in one another's worlds. Fashion can be beautiful, but ultimately it should be useful - which is why the only practical form of fashion-as-art I've ever seen was a set of oven mitts in a museum giftshop printed with images of Keith Haring cartoons.
"Fashion is not art, but like art it reflects a moment, an emotion or an attitude," says Christopher Bailey, creative director of Burberry. It's when exhibitions of fashion respond to this that they are most interesting. But when a designer aims at immortality, at becoming part of some enduring aesthetic moment, all you are left with is an odd-looking dress with a clumsy lobster on it.
When fashion meets art
The highs
Louis Vuitton's collaboration with Takashi Murakami, 2003
By combining Murakami's Japanese style with Vuitton's logomania, Marc Jacobs, the brand's creative director, managed to give his bags greater appeal among the label-lovers, including Paris Hilton.
Louis Vuitton's collaboration with Julie Verhoeven, 2002
How do you make a brand associated with shameless excess appeal to a younger, cooler crowd? Louis Vuitton covered its flashy bags with trendy artist Julie Verhoeven's dreamscapes.
Hussein Chalayan's electronic dresses
Not one for the office, but very beautiful. Chalayan closed his show last month with a series of dresses that electronically rose and fell, before disappearing entirely into the model's hat, leaving her naked.
The lows
Stella McCartney's Jeff Koons dresses, 2006
It's all very well to show off your cred by shacking up with one of the 20th-century greats. It's quite another to expect people to pay to wear unimaginative reproductions of his work on their tummies.
Marc Jacobs' Rachel Feinstein collection, 2004
US artist Rachel Feinstein is a fashion icon because she dresses like no one else. And that, funnily, is because few people want to look like a surreal librarian. Not even Gisele can carry off the high-waisted pencil skirt with p*ssy-bow blouse look.
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's cartoon dresses, 2006 While de Castelbajac's cartoon-splashed clothes may have looked revolutionary in the 70s, Snoopy jumpers and Mickey Mouse dresses now look like something you could buy at a fairground. Mainly because you can.
From Guardian.co.uk
