Influences in Fashion – Art

One instantly thinks of art and fashion and probably recalls Yves Saint Laurent’s homage collections to different contemporary artists. He exquisitely reproduced painting as walking canvases of clothing inspired by Matisse. He found inspiration in art and reproduced that in many collections. A younger fashionista may instantly recall Galliano’s collections of couture inspired by Baroque painters Van Dyk and Vermeer from the 2007 Dior Collection. This is really just scratching the surface. It also opens up a Pandora’s Box.

Many designers from the very early 20^th century have been struggling with this question of how art applies to fashion.

• Some choose to replicate the art like YSL, others view it as a leaping off point in how the fabric applies to the body.
• Some then look at the body, what is it and how much do we cover it as the body is art?
• Other designers view the body as limiting and grapple with the idea of changing the body shape or what is the essence of clothing. These designers view fashion as their media, or body as their media or the body as the canvas on which to place “A” media and make art from the wearer and the object they are wearing.

Ya see why this opens up a Pandora’s Box? There is no right or wrong as fashion, like art is subjective. AND one person’s fashion is another person’s art?

And some painters looked at fashion and made it art which inspired other artists to create as well. So let’s start here as it is the most convoluted place to start.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – Seurat’s wonder. It plays with light and color. Breaking it down into components of basic color. A huge canvas viewed from a distance, it is a painting. When viewed from up close it is nothing more than dots of color and light. They play with the eye. He took the shape of women at the time and placed them as fundimental shapes. It is basic yet detailed at the same time. This was Impressionism changing how light reflected and refracted and looked to the eye. The question of light and the challenge of how the viewer sees light inspired many.

Jean Dunard was inspired by how light reflects and experimented with lacquer. She had seen Japanese lacquered objects and pondered the refractability of the light. She came up with Lamé — a cloth with a lacquered texture that reflects light. It glitters and sparkles. It inspired Vionnet to drape. She used it in garments where Cubism (where objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form) was applied to the body. She broke the fabric in to geometric forms or cut the fabric into cubes and based her design theories on a treatice of geometry and cubism.

Cubism was intensely popular. It was modern and new. It presented the viewer with a new visual construct of how to view things. Sonia Delaunay a painter, also designed textiles and adapted her abstract paintings into textiles and then into simple, easy garments. So this question of “art and clothing” really starts to dance and take hold. Other designers like Schiaparelli liked to dapple with this question as well. She enlisted Dadaists and Surrealists perspectives to help expand the vocabulary of fashion/art. Sometimes it was embracing the work of artists like Christian Bernard to creative a design. Other times, she converted conventional objects into new ways of wearing clothing like a shoe as a hat. (Dadaism was at it’s root an artistic expression of a rejection of an ideology that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.) Thus a shoe as a hat, gloves as sleeves or accentuating the ribcage instead of hiding it supported the “theory” of dadasm. It was a new way to express art and clothing.

An extension of this could be seen through the work of designer Rei Kawadubo. She looked at the body from a new viewpoint: that is to free the body of it’s shape. She was inspired to recreate what people view as “the body” and rearrange the standard idea of what the body looks like in clothing. She tried to “deform” the body in a new way.

Other artists like Martin Margeila take a different approach in molding the body into a ‘standard’ shape that is obviously not real for the wearer, thus the body of the wearer is secondary in the garment… No matter what shape the body is in.

Take this a step further… Hussein Chalayan made a nifty little top made of wood and bolts. This challenged the concept not only the body, but what is the fabric that the body is wearing. One could look at early armor as a similar answer to this question but answered many years prior… but in this case, the garment requirement answered the question as the requirement of the garment was to be used in warfare. Chalayan later expanded this wearer requirement to include the question warmth in answering “what is the purpose of the garment to be worn?” He proposed a coat made of blankets.

With this in mind, the question of what is the purpose of the clothing can be taken and spun around. The new question is “what is the message the wearer or designer is wanting to give?” Opening up an artistic response almost similar to abstract expressionism where the action of the creation is the expression of art and fashion, not necessarily the garment itself. I put Yoshi Yamamoto’s more controversial work in line with abstract expressionism. It is not fabric, is is not really wearable. It is less an expression of clothing as it is more art.

One could say also say the expression of graffiti in cloth is perhaps also an solution to this question of expressionism. Vivienne Westwood has taken this expressionism and moved it into the realm of topical subjects with slogans of environmental protection and anti-consumerism printed on her clothing.

It is here that I must stop to pause. First to reflect on all of this as art really does inspire clothing on many levels. And secondly, I pause to this last entry of fashion and clothing as a sounding board or billboard for a message. I have never been a major fan of consumerism with trends of miscellaneously inspired/concocted clothing styles demanding purchase. I do have to take note with Westwood and her placing anti-consumerism slogans on clothing. Is this somehow supposed to provoke consumers to be inspired to buy? It is kind of a little bit oxymoronic or at least hypocritical.

Madeleine Vionnet Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA 1998

Valerie Mendes, Amy De La Haye. 20^th Century Fashion. Thames & Hudson London/New York 2005

Kay Durland Spilker, Sharon Sadako Takeda. Breaking the Mode Skira Editore S.p.A. 2007

Akiko Fukai, Tamami Suoh, Miki Iwagami, Reiko Koga, Rii Nie. Fashion. A History from the 18^th to the 20^th Century. The Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Taschen London, LA, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo 2006