Yet, unlike art, fashion rarely expresses more than the headlines of history.Īnd fashion has a practical purpose, whereas art does not. Think of how the Ossie Clark dresses in the V&A's exhibition evoke the desire for escapism at the turn of the 1970s.
Similarly, fashion is adept at fulfilling another traditional function of art by reflecting changes in contemporary culture, but only up to a point. Beautifully composed they may be, but with a forlorn beauty too subtle to be replicated in fashion.
Think of Wolfgang Tillmans's photographs of areroplane wings and window sills now on display at Tate Britain. Sometimes artists do, but for most of them beauty tends to be a by-product of their quest to explore the complex, messy, ambiguities of modern life. Yet only an old-fashioned aesthete would argue that the role of the artist is to create beauty. On the contrary, an exquisite haute couture dress - like the ones that Cristóbal Balenciaga created in his 1950s heyday - can look as perfect as a beautiful painting or sculpture. That is not to say that fashion, at its best, is not a suitable subject for museums or that it cannot share some of the attributes of art. Quibbling over whether fashion is more or less important than art is just as pointless as questioning whether or not it is art. You can't help wondering whether, if you asked Donna 'Is fashion art?', her response would be the style slut's equivalent of former Liverpool manager Bill Shankley's proclamation: 'Some say football is a matter of life and death - I'd say it's much more important than that.'
#FASHION ART CLOTHING FREE#
Now, this story tells us a great deal about Donna Karan, not least that she is refreshingly free from pretentiousness and pomposity when it comes to her chosen field. This particular shade of green, she explained breathlessly, would be perfect for next season's lingerie. He ran into the gallery only to discover his wife gazing at a bare expanse of green wall. At last, he thought, she has finally found a Picasso that inspires her. Suddenly Weiss heard Donna screaming with glee in another gallery. Instead, or so he told American Vogue, she dashed at speed from gallery to gallery barely pausing to look at the works. He hoped that his wife would love it as much as he did. On a trip to Paris, the New York fashion designer Donna Karan was dragged off to the Picasso Museum by her late husband, Stephen Weiss.
He certainly would have expected them to be in museums now. Ossie Clark would have argued that fashion was art - he definitely thought his contribution was worthwhile, and his clothes were being shown in museums even at the time. But when I see my clothes in my museum I don't feel any differently from how I felt about them at the time - I see that I believed in what I did with them, that they were the right thing to do. I myself once designed something called the Venus dress which was somewhat influenced by Botticelli, though I haven't really gone too much in that direction. Some designers are directly influenced by fine art - a lot of Bill Gibb's things were influenced by the slashed panels in dresses in, say, Flemish paintings. If you look at it that way, fine art may go by the wayside, and fashion, which has a bit more effort put into it, will take over. You could say a painting is designed to go on the wall, but if it were made as a fresco, where it was part of the wall, would you say it was not art because it was practical?įine art at the moment is no longer particularly concerned with beauty, so you could say that fashion - which is always about a concept of beauty, whether or not everyone agrees on the concept - is more relevant, more artistic, than the garbage they put out as conceptual. I don't think the fact that these things were designed to be practical distinguishes them from fine art. Fashion can tell you what people wore at a certain period just as pottery can tell you what their tea parties were like.
0 kommentar(er)
