Klimt’s ‘gilded paintings’ influence the runway
Visual art and fashion are not strange bedfellows.
Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings (published by Taschen this month) is a weighty monograph chronicling the complete works, personal letters and photographs of the artist.
The signature gilt and jewel-tone mosaics that define Klimt’s symbolist aesthetic have influenced designers’ collections over the years, Vogue reported.
Most recently, the graphic coat of many colors worn by the lover in Fulfilment has influenced a languid gown scattered with a sequence of familiar golden discs in Alexander McQueen’s resort collection. And the bohemian smock Klimt often wore himself, along with the Art Nouveau–era tunics worn by the society ladies in his portraits appear to be the thought behind Rick Owens’s voluminous, floor-length silhouettes for spring, wrote Esther Adams for Vogue.
It is known that designers look to artists as a starting point for their work, but it’s easy to see how Klimt’s highly ornate prints and sinuous lines would so effortlessly translate.
From The Kiss and The Virgin to Hope, II and Portrait of Emilie Flöge, his subjects appear swathed in vast folds of kaleidoscopic fabric that looms so large it often becomes the focus, Vogue reported.
That Flöge—his brother’s widow, who later became his life companion—was a couturiere may go some way toward explaining Klimt’s persistent fascination with textiles that not only shaped the sensual and fluid quality of his work but also extended to his even designing pieces for Flöge’s salon.
It would have been the painter’s 150th birthday in July, and as the arresting imagery in this comprehensive tome attests, Klimt’s liberated vision of modern beauty and femininity lives on.
Back in 1909, the Viennese newspaper Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt summed up his appeal like this: “Klimt has discovered or invented the new Viennese woman—a very particular type of new Viennese woman, whose grandmamas are Judith and Salome. She is charmingly immoral, delightfully sinful, enchantingly perverse.”