ABSTRACT THINKING
Byline: Allegra Holch
NEW YORK — Fashion imitated art this spring, with striking results. Painterly abstracts and other art-inspired prints turned up in a number of key runway shows. And now the trend seems to be picking up further momentum, continuing in force for fall.
Calvin Klein cited Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns as the inspirations for his spring mixes of bright primary colors and for his abstract prints. Gianni Versace went a step further, commissioning nine artists, including Julian Schnabel and Jim Dine, to create original prints for his spring collection.
The designer also showed looks inspired by Pablo Picasso and Philip Taaffe, an American artist whose paintings hang on almost every floor of the Versace flagship on Fifth Avenue. Isaac Mizrahi showed diaphanous dresses in color mixes inspired by a Mark Rothko painting. And British designer Paul Smith looked to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as influences for the playful mix of color and drip-like abstract prints in his women’s collection.
Issey Miyake, for his part, chose to collaborate with an artist, inaugurating his Pleats Please Guest Artist series with a limited-edition design by Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura. Miyake, who made the rounds of Los Angeles galleries last month scouting talent for future installments of the series, is hoping to find an unknown artist who catches his eye. “I don’t want to work with artists who are well-known and easy to understand,” he said.
But if spring’s prints were about testing the waters, then fall is the season to make a splash, and that’s exactly what many mills are trying to do.
“Art is such an important part of our lives,” says Luciana Autunno, design director at John Kaldor, the Australia-based printed fabric house. “People are inspired by what’s happening in art and all the exhibits currently going on.”
“It’s very timely,” adds John Kaldor, president of the company, of the idea of merging art and fashion. “The Biennale in Florence was a great success, and designers really seemed to enjoy the challenge of working with the artists.”
Kaldor himself collects contemporary art. When it comes to translating paintings into prints, however, he cautions: “Some artists’ work can be inspirational for designs — for example, Wassily Kandinsky’s or Paul Klee’s — but you have to take just the spirit of it. It’s not right to merely copy. The best is when it’s a collaboration between the artist and the designer.”
The idea of commissioning artists to design prints for textiles, of course, is hardly new. Elsa Schiaparelli’s collaborations in the Thirties with Salvador Dali and others are well known. In the late Forties, Zika Ascher and his wife, Lida, also created a buzz in the fashion world when they recruited a number of celebrated and up-and-coming artists to design prints for their textile firm, Ascher Studio, in London. Among them were Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Lucien Freud.
The company, now based in New York and run by the Aschers’ son, Peter, was back in the news when Anna Sui resurrected a Christian Berard print from Ascher’s archives for the Forties-style dresses in her spring ’95 collection. But there are many more original designs in the archives that are just beginning to be reissued, and the timing couldn’t be better. For spring ’98, Ascher plans to reintroduce two Matisse florals which were originally designed in 1947 — a decision that was prompted by the upcoming “Matisse e la Mode” exhibit at the Matisse Museum in Nice slated to open in April. He will also lend the original designs to the museum for the show. And Ascher is lending seven of the artist-designed “Ascher squares” scarves, along with correspondence from the artists, to London’s Imperial War Museum for an exhibition of Forties fashion which opens next month.
“Designers are looking for inspiration from the art world and the environment now,” said Phil Shroff, a color forecaster and consultant to Monsanto. “People are getting more attuned to art — there’s more of an appreciation of it, and people in the fashion business are finding inspiration from the colors and motifs in art.” He and his wife, Dhun, have just introduced a collection of scarves for spring ’98 inspired by artists such as Picasso, Kandinsky and Joan Miro, under the label Dilemma.
For the French fabric firm RK12, the abstract painting print is the logical next step after all the geometrics flooding the market. “Everyone is tired of the geometric prints influenced by Prada,” says Gilles Amsallem, director of RK12’s New York office. “People are reacting to the abstract prints because they see it as a way to go forward from the geometric trend. It’s a way to go beyond something that has been overdone.”
“The most important thing is to give a new twist or look to the prints,” notes John Kaldor. “Designs and fashion have been safe, with mundane prints. By just looking outside the narrow confines of basic fashion, it gives a newer, broader, fun look.”
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