Why Fashion Loves Art…
The 2018 MET Gala’s theme was, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and The Catholic Imagination”, so many designers were inspired by Catholic art. One of the dresses that stood out was the dress Vera Wang designed for Ariana Grande. This fairytale gown is screen-printed with images from Michelangelo’s iconic fresco, The Last Judgement, which adorns the sanctuary wall of the Sistine Chapel.
Louis Vuitton started out in the late 1830s working for a maker of trunks and valises, where he stayed for seventeen years before branching out on his own in 1854. Travel and tourism were growing as activities, and he noticed that by keeping the trunks flat, they could become stackable, while also replacing leather with canvas, since it was more flexible and not inclined to crack.
His designs caught on, which naturally led to several imitators. In response, Vuitton designed a signature logo and stamped it all over his wares as a certification of their authenticity, and, by implication, their prestige. With it, logo culture was born.
"Prestige," which is a word applied to frequently to high-end fashion, and implied in the world of art, is a more intriguing world than you may first think. The 2006 Christopher Nolan film, The Prestige, played on the more common usage of the term while also referring to its more anachronistic meaning, which is “illusion”. Hence a magician is an illusionist but also a “prestigitator”.
It’s a fun word that we can also keep in mind when we think of prestige in art and prestige in fashion, because both rely entirely on persuasion and perception. What is more, for both fashion and art, “authenticity” is an important, but always precarious term.
Because of this, the relationship between art and fashion is equally precarious. A chief reason for this is that fashion tends to wear on its sleeve what art tries to hide, or resist. Fashion is about image, opinion, and appearance.
Even though contemporary art, in particular, is oriented around all of these as well, it uses a more venerable language, one inherited before fashion becomes something available to all who could afford it (at the end of the eighteenth century), that it is timeless.
As implied in the very word itself, fashion is not timeless but rather the opposite, and subject to whim. Fashion is "dead" as soon as it appears since implied within what we see is the certainty of its being surpasses by something else.
Contemporary fashions, however, are not governed by any universals anymore, and it is next to impossible to assert too heavily as to what is in fashion. You may be more likely to do so in the contemporary art world or worlds.
To recap: art sees itself as superior to fashion. Fashion is the runt of the cultural litter. Art is serious, it is about serious things that it treats and expresses in complex and nuanced ways, while fashion is frivolous and fleeting, it is coveted by the vain and shallow.
But this evaluation hardly passes muster after visiting an exhibition of contemporary art these days. Contemporary art is also governed by a system of what the economist and art commentator, Don Thompson, has called brand galleries and brand artists. Again, this is all a matter of prestige, where there is something of the reciprocal dynamic between the artists a gallery has in its "stable" and the kind of respect the gallery "itself" commands.
It works in pretty much the same way as a fashion house having a celebrity wear an example of its clothes for a runway event or endorsing their products in other ways, including being willing to advertise.
Art has been in on this game for far longer, dating back to the Renaissance. Nobles and rulers who knew that their authority was precarious would bolster their name by showing that they could attract the best artists. The Medicis in Florence were well aware of this. Ludovico Sforza of Milan, started his life as a mercenary, so to have Leonardo da Vinci in his employ was an understandably welcome idea.
The meeting of fashion and art happens in numerous ways. On the most innocuous level, fashions are recorded in paintings. What is less known, however, is that the man credited with inventing Haute Couture, Charles Frederick Worth, sought inspiration from old master paintings—Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Watteau, it was a non-copyright smorgasbord then in the 1860s and ‘70s—for his opulent gowns. But instead of plagiarism or just rip-off, the term used in the fashion world is “inspiration”. Just as the film industry thrives on remakes, the fashion world is an intricate web of rip-offs or just “riffs-on”.
Again, this is well known; it's on the surface. Your browser algorithm is even tailored to show you examples of like-minded goods and spin-offs when searching for fashion. Zara has established a whole empire of fast fashion based on cheap imitations of significant designs that have just appeared.
Art, too, is awash with copying and ripping off. Artists will fob off accusations with airy rhetoric such as "working in an established style" of engaging in a "homage". This all makes the business pretty slippery, and most unoriginal artists are easily ignored and eventually slip away.
More sinister is the art market, approximately 40% of which is occupied with fakes. Faking it is a major underground art industry, and an art in itself.
Many artists of the early twentieth-century avant-garde designed fashions, such as the Italian Futurist, Giacomo Balla, who drew a large number of zany outfits, which sadly went unrealised. He was so prolific in this area that he is suitably and conveniently sidelined or just deleted in the art history books.
Salvador Dalí collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli, their most famous item being the Lobster Dress that the soon-to-abdicate wife-to-be of Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson, modelled for Cecil Beaton for a Vogue shoot in 1936. An amusing aside is that for Dalí, the lobster was a symbol of sexual appetite, and dear Wallis didn't lack for that!
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the early decades of the twentieth century enlisted major artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Derain to designs costumes, sets, and props. Chanel. Too, designed for him.
Only now that some, and I stress some, art historians and critics are coming to grips with the crucial contributions made to visual culture.
Art has always had an ambivalent relationship with fashion, which it needs to have to maintain its superiority. The fashion industry’s financial turnover only rivals that of the art world. But this works in fashion's favour. Fashion enlists brand artists using the anachronistic values of art’s purported superiority for its own ends. The Cartier Foundation has now for several decades held large-budget shows of prominent contemporary artists. (What kinds of shows, you ask? I'll return to that in a moment.)
Where once in the early twentieth century it was the avant-garde that rubbed shoulders with forward-looking designers, now it has become mainstream, or rather brand, or celebrity artists who are dragooned by major fashion houses and designers.
The case in point that immediately springs to mind is again the brand of brands, Louis Vuitton—in 2012, Vuitton "collaborated" (I always love the loose use of this word that nonetheless carries such a warm feeling of social cohesion) with Yayoi Kusama, which included a waxwork likeness of the artist in a red outfit with white dots holding a matching handbag, standing amidst a forest of giant squid-like tendrils, also of red with white dots.
Vuitton has connecting galleries to many of the boutiques in major cities. The upshot of such “collaborations” is that Vuitton is in effect feeding off the “artness" of the artist. Given that the artist is a celebrity artist, then the "artness", like some cosmic energy, is rich and thick.
After Kusama, the doyen of art meets capitalism, Jeff Koons, was invited to "collaborate", designing a series of bags which involved reproductions of famous paintings from (male) Western art: Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Turner, Rubens, Fragonard, Da Vinci. To avoid any ambiguity whatsoever, the bag was stamped with the artist's name in bold white capitals over the image.
In many ways, these bags can be seen as the pinnacle of branding. I challenge anyone to show me a better example of brand-saturation. Here you had the brand of brands, Vuitton, together with arguably (with Damien Hirst) the most famous and certainly the richest living artist, Jeff Koons, who uses well-known images from the Western art historical canon since the seventeenth century.
The result is decidedly tawdry, kitsch that has somehow come full circle to be stylish again. But who’s listening to me?
In 2017, Koons designed the shop windows of Vuitton: if you travelled from Nice to Milan to Rome, you could be assured of the same spectacle: the pristine, shiny balloon rabbit surrounded by metallic balloons.
In May 2019, the original Rabbit sold at Christie’s for $91 million, the highest sum for a work at auction by a living artist. Did its cameos by its avatars in Vuitton help this along? It would be naïve to say otherwise. Exposure is everything. Collaboration indeed: Koons added his kudos to Vuitton, who then succeeded in upping his prices, although in the market report of the record sale conveniently omitted the collusion.
This may be the most highfalutin example where there are countless others. In the same year as Koons’ foray into window decoration, Raf Simmons, for his spring menswear collection, made a series of overt references to Robert Mapplethorpe. This time it was billed as a "collaboration" with the Mapplethorpe Foundation. I think this means that the Foundation allowed him to do this without the risk of a lawsuit in return for a percentage of profits and publicity.
It is all about the window-dressing, after all. The kinds of artists and works that fashion houses choose to consort with are highly circumscribed. First, the artist is well known and, more often than not, associated with high profitability in their sales and prominent in the circulation of their work. They have a name, and they have a representative style or have representative works. In other words, they and their works are brands.
Second, their work is established as a brand. It has seeped under the skin of popular culture. If it ruffled any feathers in its time, it is now considered “classic”, or as recognised by the establishment for marking a period in the recent past.
In other words, the work is not experimental, it raises no hackles, it neither shocks nor disturbs. Or, if at all, the shock of the pleasant titter variety, or a jolly chortle over a stunned gasp.
Third, tricky or controversial references are either absent or downplayed. Koons' Rabbit was perfect because it was at the limits of innocuousness. At the time when he was producing his earliest work, to which Rabbit belongs, the word that Koons willingly courted was “banal”. (At the end of the 1980s, Artforum reported that “banal” was the most commonly used adjective used in art criticism.) Now all but forgotten, the reduction ad absurdum of Koons’ proud banality is mined for all its lack of complexity for the sublime cause of high-end fashions and commodity. A telling fate, if you ask me, but still beyond the reach of most of us.
As far as sexual or ethnic identity, the dial is on low. It is suitable for it to be there, as with Kusama and Mapplethorpe, which shows that high fashion has liberal intent, but it is done in such a way to avoid any misunderstanding, which means to say as little as possible. In Simmons' collection, there was, of course, no reference to one of Mapplethorpe's most striking (and shocking and funny I'd have to say) photographs, Man in a Polyester Suit: the frame cuts off the head and shoulder, with the central emphasis being on the huge penis dangling from an open fly. Or there's another of the artist himself inserting a bullwhip up his anus. Or nude or semi-nude portraits of Lisa Lyon, a lesbian bodybuilder.
The references were supremely vetted and control, all in the name of some non-existent idea of political serenity.
The works have to be catchy, if not vacuous. There can be no chance of quizzicality. Viewers have to “get it” straight away.
That’s the wager. Fashion loves art, a very limited kind of art to bolster, to amplify the big fat illusion of a world of fulfilled promises and no ambiguities. That’s what prestige is all about.
