Art and Fashion: A Marriage of In-convenience
For several years now, and more particularly since the health crisis, contemporary art has permeated and stimulated the image of all haute couture houses. And the richer this image appears, diversified to a dizzying degree, dynamic and productive to a nauseating extreme, the more the garment, as an open question (about the body, culture, the relationship to the world), falls into an instrumentalisation that favours its immediate consumption.
Is the artist a willing victim? They are asked to supply motifs, to exhibit in shops or to participate in some marketing operation.The “scandalous” or glamorous stars of the art market are summoned. Young talents too. Thus, the craze is for street art, an obligatory reference for any brand that wants to be on the (very lucrative) border between haute couture and street wear (Comme des Garçons, in 2020, with the artist Kaws). The process goes further. From now on, as an influencer, a brand must have expertise in contemporary art, promoting, via the collections, a whole galaxy of young talents spotted on social networks, such as the Spaniard Coco Capitán.
In this permanent renewal of forms and contents, the key word is collaboration, a term that opens the doors to dithyrambic press releases highlighting one of the major axes of all contemporary propaganda: storytelling aimed at the young fashion sphere from Generation Y then Z (born after 1990). Olivier Rousteing (Balmain), Alessandro Michele (Gucci) or Nicolas Ghesquière (Louis Vuitton) have understood this perfectly. What could be more moving than the meeting between a collection director and an artist? Started in the 1980s, the movement was amplified in 2000 by Vuitton with its commissioning of designs for Speedy, Keepall and Neverfull bags from eminent artists. Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, and this year Paola Pivi and Vik Muniz, have tried their hand at it with more or less wit, more or less distance. Without much aesthetic interest, the exercise was nevertheless a considerable financial success. With the pandemic, the phenomenon of these collaborations intensified. A number of directors have taken a step back and realised that the infernal calendar imposes collection after collection (haute couture, cruise collections,
Auroboros x Ai-Da. Robot Ai-Da en in top Ava et and manteau coat Atokirina. Septembre 2021 september. (© Auroboros)
capsule collections, etc.), leading to overproduction that feeds a second market that is detrimental to the brand’s image. Grazia Chiuri (Dior), Anthony Vaccarello (Yves Saint Laurent), Pierpaolo Piccioli (Valentino), Dries Van Notten and others have said that they refuse to accept this rhythm. Their awareness is accompanied by an undeniable pleasure: indulging in reading art books. For we are faced with a new generation of fashion house directors, trained in schools (notably the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp) which have introduced them to art practices. All of them are perfectly aware of the stakes of appropriation.This is demonstrated by the fact that some of them—Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan—have definitively abandoned their profession as designers in favour of an artistic activity (or, conversely, the metamorphosis of the artist Sterling Ruby into a designer in 2019 with S.R. Studio).
As rarely before, the post-lockdown collections display these collaborations: the autumn-winter 2021-22 men’s show for Dior imagined jointly by Peter Doig and Kim Jones, the Hermès autumn-winter 2022 show with a set painted by Flora Moscovici, or Matthew M. Williams (Givenchy), whose haute couture pieces (spring-summer 2022) were designed using motifs produced by Josh Smith. As for Daniel Roseberry (Schiaparelli), he revisited the house’s previous collaborations through the prism of Dalí, resulting in ensembles (autumn-winter 2021) that were more destined for the museum than to actually be worn.
MODELS AS STANDARD BEARERS More exciting are the interactions between a designer and an artist when they lead to a reconsideration of the garment, its cut and the way it interacts with a body. Yves Saint Laurent was a precursor with the Mondrian dresses designed for the autumn-winter 1965 collection. The absolute geometry of the pattern convinced him to break free from a classic line required to mark the waist. The dress is short, straight, without frills. Compared to the 1990s, a singular moment of experimentation with forms or the revelation of other sexualities (Comme des Garçons, Hussein Chalayan, Issey Miyake, Vivienne Westwood, Viktor & Rolf, Jean-Paul Gaultier, etc.), contemporary collections seem quite tame. Nowadays, you have to turn to Pierpaolo Piccioli (Valentino), among others, to rediscover some of this utopia. He designs down jackets for Moncler inspired by garments warn by the madonnas in Quattrocento paintings. The hieratic cuts combine questions about the body-clothing relationship with a desire to transform these attempts into wearable finery for all.The commitment of this discreet designer to contemporary art was evident in the women’s haute couture show last July. With his unparalleled knowhow, he designed certain pieces in close dialogue with sixteen artists and sixteen paintings (Wu Rui, James Nares, Benni Bosetto, etc.). Each painting prompted a rethinking of the material, shape and structure of the dresses or jackets, not in terms of their motifs but in terms of the spaces deployed in the paintings themselves. By declaring “fashion is not an art”, he had clearly set the conditions for the exercise: to transpose the artists’ questions into the cut and fluid material of the fabrics. In other cases, art becomes the subject of the collection: Viktor & Rolf designed two experimental collections in 2015 and 2016, one devoted to sculpture, the other to the painting form. Not without a sense of humour, the duo had constructed their shows as learned variations on the materiality of the work of art and its possible deconstruction, transforming mannequins into standard bearers of post-modernism. But the great novelty of this period was the switch to digital and e-commerce.There was a profusion of publications on all media, with virtual books, designers’ drawings on Instagram, focus on certain pieces staged by influencers, posters with QR codes linking to Time Capsule collections... Two notable exceptions are worth noting: in January 2021, Bottega Veneta closed its Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts in favour of an online magazine entrusted to Rosemarie Trockel and then to Okuyama Taiki. At the same time, Jonathan Anderson (Loewe) replaced the traditional fashion show with a wallpaper by the artist Anthea Hamilton and, for the men’s collection, published a sumptuous box set in homage to the writer and artist Joe Brainard, featuring preparatory drawings, fabric samples and photographs of the collection.
SCROLLING DOWN CATWALKS
As a result of lockdown, the very idea of the fashion show was to be reviewed, no longer as a simple presentation of pieces of clothing but as a “fiction” staged by filmmakers or choreographers, concerned to see how it was possible to ponder the body and gesture through luxury clothing. If the tandem of fashion and contemporary dance has been operating for a long time (Dior and Roland Petit in 1947, more recently Jean-Paul Gaultier and Régine Chopinot, or Gareth Pugh who tried to imagine clothes “that resist choreography” for Wayne McGregor in 2017), the choreographed shows of the last few years seem terribly tame. Certainly, almost all of them seek to deconstruct the classic walk and procession of models on the catwalk, positing that this is a time of hybrid corporealities where dancing, performing, and identifying merge. Exemplary in this respect was Issey Miyake’s Homme Plissé line, choreographed since 2020 by Daniel Ezralow, which questions the essence of everyday gestures in joyfully playful stagings. Equally exciting is Isabel Marant’s work with the company La Horde for a show (springsummer 2021) that mixes models and dancers in a choreography that refuses to accept gender stereotypes. But besides one or two successes, what can we say about the classicism of Sharon Eyal for Dior (spring-summer 2019)? What can be said about these very young choreographers claiming to be artists, such as Ryan Chappell (choreographer for Lily Allen, Janet Jackson, Gucci, Stella McCartney, Fendi, Vuitton) or Jordan Robson (Kenzo, Prada, Chanel...), who pro
duce events—with well-known guests—perfectly calibrated for the camera. The most disconcertingly striking was undoubtedly Olivier Rousteing (Balmain) producing a show for TikTok that brought together Andrew Makadsi, Beyoncé’s artistic director, the choreographer Jean-Charles Jousni and the singerYseult. In the face of this one-upmanship, the video recording of Jacquemus’ fashion show (autumn-winter 2019-20) offered a gleeful poetic alternative with the models walking through a simple lavender field in the south of France.
CYBERFASHION
The lockdown was also an accelerator of experiments with 3D software allowing the unthinkable: the totally virtual fashion show. This was the case with Hanifa’s autumn-winter 2021 collection. Forget the human being, from now on the parading of clothes would be on a black background, without models, as if in levitation. For Alphonse Maitrepierre, a young virtuoso of haute couture, 3D is an integral part of the creative process. For his latest collection (spring-summer 2021), he enlisted the help of Ai-Da, the first robot painter, designer and sculptor. Maitrepierre structured creations around the fluorescentcoloured prints created by the android artist and the volumes created by these motifs. In the end, this line is a tribute to draping and asymmetry, in an aesthetic that amplifies the morphological ambiguity of the body. As for the young house Anrealage, its Dimension collection (autumn-winter 2021) was a fusion of animation, fashion show and 3D creation. 3D dresses were programmed specifically for the heroine of the animated feature film Belle (by Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda). They were then presented in a virtual fashion show and finally materialized as real clothes. Are we witnessing the emergence of cyberfashion, disconnected from any link with the real world? The Auroboros brand recently proposed a virtual runway designed entirely by software. These digital, caricatured and unstructured garments found a first purely digital “embodiment” via the internet, where these metalooks made it possible to customise consumers’ posts, to adorn some of them for a Zoom meeting or, more simply, to dress an avatar during its adventures in the metaverse. They could also enter the real world, manufactured individually in the brand’s workshops, once the order was placed by specifying the measurements.
It was impossible to ignore this new market and this young generation ready to invest in sophisticated outfits that would allow them to stand out on the networks. In September 2021, Balenciaga was invited into the video game Fortnite, Dior and Louboutin into Zepeto (a Korean metaverse with 100 million downloads that features the world of fashion), and Dolce & Gabbana is selling four virtual creations (dresses, suits and tiaras) without any tangible counterparts. The fashion designer Julien Fournié has just created a digital branch within his fashion house to meet the needs of the metaverse. Artists, graphic and web designers are likely to become the future collection directors. Their limitless imaginations suggest that we are on the verge of experimental collections that will revolutionise the very idea of clothing, which is not yet the case. Contemporary art isn’t absent from this movement. Gucci has already organised the sale of an NFT inspired by its Aria show at Christie’s last May. Valentino has just produced an animated NFT created by Sara Ludy based on the world of Pierpaolo Piccioli and offered at $18,000. Givenchy recently teamed up with artist Chito for the exceptional sale of fifteen NFTs.
ARTKETING
Beyond this infatuation with digital, haute couture continues to engage in more traditional actions. While all the major houses have contemporary art foundations (Prada, Hermès, Yves Saint Laurent...), some directors are developing a more radical policy (Loewe, Prada, Miyake...). Of all of them, Anthony Vaccarello (Yves Saint Laurent) is undoubtedly the most passionate, as evidenced by his commissions from Abel Ferrara, Wong Kar-wai and Vanessa Beecroft. The latest commitment: the creation by Doug Aitken, last July, of a pavilion on La Certosa island in Venice. Open to the public, this architectural structure made up of
prisms and mirrors appears like a celestial object set in the middle of a territory marked by the Baroque. The only condition of the commission, entirely financed by the haute couture house, was that it be used temporarily as a showcase for the men’s fashion show in July 2020. Beyond this success (visible for only six months), Vaccarello is responsible for other equally surprising actions. While he regularly organises and supervises major exhibitions in the brand’s boutiques ( Dark Shadows, Memphis), in 2020 he also proposed one of the most beautiful exhibitions of Helmut Lang sculptures.
But beyond such an enthusiast, how many operations geared to the manufacture of a brand image? The latest trend is to infiltrate art fairs. During the recent Art Basel Miami fair, the invitation to Edward Granger to animate (paint) the facade of the Scotch & Soda boutique or the creation by Es Devlin of a vast olfactory labyrinth celebrating the famous Chanel No. 5 (with more than 1,000 trees planted) are nothing more than demonstrative, playful follow-ups intended for global communication. We have to get used to it, fashion being governed by “artketing”, a popular concept that shows how fashion
appropriates the codes and names of art for marketing purposes. Does it work every time? Not for sure. The partnership between MoMA and Uniqlo for artists’ collections was a resounding commercial failure. Other partnerships and other gatherings have met the same fate. With such legerdemain, which is too often based on excessiveness, banking on collaborations and appropriating the codes of the art market also means bending the structure of the market to make it more plastic and more capable of conforming to the changes in the economy. Fashion and luxury ready-to-wear generated $1.5 trillion in sales in 2018, and will probably generate $1.8 trillion in 2025. In this respect, the pandemic was a signal that future fashion consumerism will take other paths. And if, as a model and accelerator of this mutation, art may lose some of its mystery, it may gain an increase in visibility and vitality. It is up to each of us to decide.
Translation: Chloé Baker
Damien Sausset is a critic and curator specialising in contemporary art. Author of numerous monographs, he was director of the art centre Le Transpalette in Bourges (2011-2018). Since the end of the 1990s, when he was Issey Miyake’s assistant, he has also followed the evolution of fashion.