NEW YORK — The “Is fashion art?” debate is one that rankles curators, artists and designers alike, and yet there is no real consensus.
Inconclusive as it may be, some scholars and museum brass tackled the subject during “The Art of Fashion” symposium at the Fashion Institute of Technology March 9 and 10.
In the first 100 years of fashion (1870 to 1970), Charles Worth and Paul Poiret deemed themselves artists, with the former exhibiting that by wearing an oversize beret as an overt clue of his artistry and the latter relying more on aesthetics, said Valerie Steele, director and chief curator at the Museum at FIT.
While introducing Ralph Rucci, one of Saturday’s speakers, Steele said: “Fashion can be art, but not all fashion is art.”
As fashion has taken a more prominent role in art exhibitions, some critics have responded with skepticism. “These things as art is a matter that has raised so much anger in the journalistic discourse,” said Steele. “They will say, ‘How can you put a Versace dress in a museum along with Raphael’s cartoons and Michelangelo’s statues?’ The catch is a lot of contemporary art would annoy some critics, as well.”
During her presentation, “Fashion: Art of Dying, Art of Living,” Barbara Vinken, a professor of French and comparative literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, said: “Worth transformed fashion from a craft to an art and in this process made himself a name. What he created was above all a name for himself and he became the first man in a business that until then had been largely dominated by women.
“He also was the first to design a dress that was easy to reproduce,” continued Vinken.
Fashion photography also has borrowed from the art world, Steele said, in her presentation, “The Art of Fashion.” CK One’s black-and-white group shots of grungy men and women were reminiscent of Richard Avedon’s photographs of Andy Warhol’s Factory gang, and Benetton’s burning car ads “directly referenced” Warhol’s image of burning cars, Steele said.
Conversely, Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market in London resembles an art gallery, Steele said. With the six-floor space featuring a plethora of designers, Kawakubo said she wanted “to create a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos: the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision.”
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Steele praised the Japanese designer for focusing on aesthetics and beauty. Kawakubo has said, “Fashion is a business, not art,” even though her work and collaborations might suggest otherwise. More than anything, Kawakubo would like to see the breaking down of the barriers between fashion and art, Steele said.
Chris Townsend’s “Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, 1970-2002,” which was staged at London’s Barbican Art Gallery a few years ago, also won adulation from Steele. He delved into the give-and-take between fashion and art, suggesting artists are attracted to the danger, effect and feminine pleasures afforded by fashion. By focusing on the past 30 years, Townsend avoided presenting a show that seemed encyclopedic, Steele said.
The Kate Moss hologram at Alexander McQueen’s fashion show was one example Steele singled out as to how artists and fashion designers feed off each other. In recent years, art has expanded to include architecture and its influence on fashion. Fall’s opening of the “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was testimony to that.
Vinken noted how Comme des Garçons’ store in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood is visited by tourists just like any art gallery, and the company has used photographer Cindy Sherman to shoot its advertising campaigns. “Fashion today in its most interesting examples no longer mimics art. Rather, designers are working on a living body,” she said, adding that is an enviable task in the eyes of artists.
Vinken went on to say that fashion is now devoted to an art of dying, which is not a cause to feel melancholy in her eyes. The way she sees it, the material used for clothes shows traces of youth, the time required to make the garment and the history of the period. “It represents nothing but time,” she said.
In a discussion Saturday, Tamsen Schwartzman, associate research curator at the Museum at FIT, said not only does art find its way into fashion, but the reverse is true, as well. “There are still many who have trouble viewing fashion as art,” Schwartzman said, pointing out how the medium has found other ways into museums and into more commonly accepted art.
“Fashion is not just aligning itself with art,” Schwartzman said. “Art is realizing it is doing well to align itself with fashion.”
Schwartzman showed slides of Marilyn Minter’s “Shit Kicker,” which showed designer shoes soiled by a suspended brown liquid; E.V. Day’s “Bombshell,” which played on Marilyn Monroe’s famous white dress; Tom Sachs’ “Prada Death Camp” and “Chanel Guillotine,” and Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s “Prada Marfa,” a model Prada store set in the middle of the Texas desert for art pilgrims to visit.
In their respective talks Friday, Harold Koda, curator of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum at FIT’s deputy director, Patricia Mears, addressed the painstaking details for which exemplary construction calls.
“The amazing genius of [Cristóbal] Balenciaga was he superseded his teachers,” Koda said, while discussing “The Cutting Edge: High Concept and Pattern Piece.”
He also noted how Ralph Rucci, whose retrospective is up at the Museum at FIT, is “very much engaged” by the components of grading (see sidebar, this page). The late Geoffrey Beene also looked for novel ways of extending the vocabulary of other designers, especially in relation to patterns. Koda recalled how he once asked Beene for his view of the midriff-baring trend. “He said, ‘Anyone knows the navel is a scar,'” Koda said.
The Costume Institute’s curator roused the crowd with the introduction of two women dressed in Paul Poiret replica pieces. The designs, which included a gold gown made of only three pieces of fabric, were made for a recent presentation for the Paris press touting “Poiret: King of Fashion,” which bows at the Met in May.
Mears referenced one of Isabel Toledo’s dresses, which was essentially a series of circles that morphed into a bubble dress, and Yeohlee’s Enfanto dress, which was one circle on top of another. “Yeohlee [Teng] has said, ‘I am inspired by architecture, but I am not an architect. Inspiration can come from architecture and it can be modified,'” Mears said.
She repeated something she has told her graduate students repeatedly: This is an incredibly exciting time in our world. She said, in addition, the arena is wide open for someone to write definitively about the connections between art, fashion and design. She said she is hopeful the upcoming generation will do just that.