Runway Artifex

Probably the most re-posted look from the 2017 fashion week in Paris was at the Maison Margiela Artisanal show, where an all white trench coat by John Galliano was adorned by a ghostly portrait made of tulle, by multi-disciplinary artist Benjamin Shine. The dark mesh material that continues to wrap the model’s silhouette, even beyond the limits of the garment, creates a sculpture that apparently took more than 300 hours to make. Priceless. Who can put a price on art, you might say, especially when it turns into an everyday piece you can actually live in. The collaboration between the artist, who seems to be very hot at the moment, and Galliano, the once bad boy that has withdrawn to his work, avoiding public attention, after his drunk rant in 2011 cost him his job at Dior, has brought back to the spotlight one of the favorite themes of fashion writers: The fusion between art and fashion.

Looking back, one must start by paying tribute to Elsa Schiaparelli, the woman who lived in both worlds, creating dresses that were sometimes un-wearable, due to their strong artistic vision. However, there was a moment when she moved beyond her inspiration, the artist Salvador Dalí allowed one of her dresses to become the canvas for his art. The Lobster Dress they co-created in 1937 is a simple, white dress with a giant lobster, painted by Dalí, as homage to his 1934 creation “New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone.”

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Around the same time, another artist who crossed over to commercial fashion was the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. His highly recognizable squares and lines featuring white backgrounds, grids of thick black lines and blocks of colours, created a neoplastic style influenced by cubism. The fashion world did not remain unimpressed. In the 1930’s, Hermès designer Lola Prusac looked to his famous works for inspiration, producing a range of luggage and bags with square inlays of red, yellow and blue leather. Even after he passed away, in 1944, Mondrian and his work continued to influence fashion. At the very heart of the mod fashion revolution, in 1965, Yves Saint Laurent saw huge success with his “Fall Mondrian Collection”. The six A-line cocktail dresses he designed, created the best form of display for Mondrian’s work. They were made up of many separate pieces of wool jersey and were hand-assembled to hide obvious seaming, creating one of the most iconic dresses in the history of fashion. It was around that time when a young man by the name of Andy Warhol had started out in fashion, creating illustrations for glossy magazines and designing for advertisements of products such as Elsa Schiaparelli’s gloves. In a lovely twist of fate, his rightful place in fashion came posthumously, with Gianni Versace‘s 1991 Pop Art collection that included a jewel-encrusted version of the artist’s iconic Marilyn Monroe prints.

TRUE TO FORM

Fast-forwarding to today, one of the best moments when art and fashion joined in aesthetic matrimony was in 2013. Three years after the passing of Alexander McQueen, one of the darkest minds in the history of fashion, the house’s team decided to create an exclusive collaboration with another dark and peculiar mind, the artist Damien Hirst. Ethereal and haunting, McQueen took inspiration from Hirst’s Entomology series, with butterflies, spiders and other insects crawling across his collection of 30 chiffon scarfs, forming geometric patterns across their fabric. Very close to McQueen’s vision, two ridiculously talented sisters, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, of Rodarte took a leap of faith in each other when, only a year before the McQueen –Hirst merge, they touched the work of a genius. Their 2012 collection was a study on Vincent Van Gogh, whether by incorporating subtle references to the impressionist painter’s thick brush strokes within their light fabrics and color palette, or boldly displaying their tribute to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in their iconic flower print chiffon dress. In a similar manner, one cannot forget Zac Posen’s 2010 Autumn/Winter collection, where he used textiles painted by Rosson Crow. The enigmatic American painter has been quoted as saying in an interview: "I got a call from a stylist friend, a boy I hadn't talked to in years". "He said, 'My boyfriend wants to work with you.' I said, 'Who are you dating now?" And he said, 'Zac Posen.' I went, 'Oh my God. I'd love to!" And sometimes, apparently, it is just as easy as saying "yes." For some fashion houses being in a tight knit relationship with art is not just a temporary fling of inspiration but a lifetime commitment. Hermès uses their scarves as silk squares of artistic expression, housing incredible works of art that become collector’s items. Their latest collaboration came in the form of a question, “And the winner is?”. In 2016, 315 Hermès boutiques around the world featured a scarf made by Elias Kafouros, their first ever men’s scarf since the inception of the House in 1937. Kafouros’ design is a tribute to the historic House itself, a gesture of acknowledgement to their life-long dedication in promoting the arts. Sometimes art is so powerful that it takes up a lot more space than a dress or a scarf…Taking inspiration to the next level, Marc Jacobs embraced conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s vision to create their unforgettable 2013 Louis Vuitton collaboration, a kaleidoscope of squares and bright yellows together with checkered blacks that didn’t just stay on the clothes but also adorned the whole runway he staged at the Louvre, causing a fashion frenzy.

Apparently having a knack for art, Marc Jacobs had already discovered how well art can work for fashion, even back in 2003, when he invited Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami to work on a, now-famous, range of handbags for Louis Vuitton which re-invented the company’s signature LV emblem. According to the fashion designer, in a quote that ideally summarizes what art and fashion mean to each other, "this has been, and continues to be, a monumental marriage of art and commerce. The ultimate cross-over - one for both fashion, and art history books."