Can fashion be considered art? Several arguments lead to this belief. There are of course the many collaborations. Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami (2003), The Row and Damian Hirst or even Marina Abramović & Costume National (2015) showed that clothing artists and pictorial or installation artists get along wonderfully… There are also fashion shows that look more and more like happenings, such as the last Louis Vuitton show, who recreated the Center Pompidou in the Cour Carrée du Louvre for his latest collection. And after Gucci, it's Jacquemus' turn this summer to call on artist Chloe Wise to illustrate its new campaign. For a long time, designers have drawn inspiration from the world of art. Maria Grazia Chiuri confided to us last month: “I don't believe that art and fashion should be put on the same level. Each has its own base and scope. These are two different schools, with ways of doing things and values that must dialogue together. The two fields have things in common and, of course, they are both evolving in line with contemporary visual culture.” We sought to find out more about the inspiring and emotional union between artists and designers by interviewing Damien Delille, art and fashion historian, teacher at the Lumière Lyon 2 University.
Madame Figaro.- What are the greatest similarities between art and fashion?Damien Delille.- They share the same interest in aesthetics, beauty, a complex relationship with luxury and pageantry, a passion for ornate or idealized representations of the human body, and above all, a shared reflection on the material world around us. With the contradictions and the effects of alienation that it entails. Baudelaire was one of the first in the 19th century to emphasize the relationship between modernity and art and fashion, linked to the beauty of the ephemeral, the spirit of the times and the transformation of the banal. However, the decorative and applied arts have often wished to moralize fashion and in particular denounce its rhetoric. There would be an emptiness of the artificial image of fashion, a vanity of ostentation, a staging of both consumable and disposable desires.
Can fashion be seen as an art, and the couturier as an artist in its own right? This idea of considering fashion as an art is a journalistic invention to give intellectual backing to fashion. Since the 19th century and the beginning of the commercial valuation of artistic creation, the creation of a dress has been compared to the production of a painting, the label of the brand to a canvas signature, the couturier to an artist, the fashion house to an art gallery. Charles Frederick Worth, the first of the Parisian couturiers, made fun of this by posing for the photographer Nadar, dressed in an artist's blouse à la Rembrandt, while the caricaturists mocked the women who went to see him in his fashion house , in the same way as a visit to an art fair. The links continued throughout the 20th century: the creators took themselves for artists who dabble in everything, such as Paul Poiret who made furniture and perfume lines, Elsa Schiaparelli who was inspired by the surrealist ideas of Salvador Dali , André Courrèges who collaborated with the sculptor Arman, or the famous example of the resumption of abstract geometric patterns by Piet Mondrian by Yves Saint Laurent. Overall, I believe that there were above all fruitful exchanges and dialogues between artists and fashion designers, often cross inspirations, but rarely designers-artists. The perfect example remains Sonia Delaunay, who managed to be a pioneer of abstract art, with her husband Robert, and a formidable fashion designer during the 1920s. This union of talents doubly penalized her. The too technical practice and linked to the feminine world of fashion according to the artistic avant-gardes as well as its too artistic and intellectual approach for the world of fashion, during the interwar period served it.
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Can we feel the same type of emotion in front of a parade as in front of a painting? Do not try to put on the same level different aesthetic regimes, as the philosopher Jacques Rancière explained, but seek their specificities . Two aesthetic emotions, certainly close, take place during a fashion show and in front of a painting. However, the parade incorporates a spectacular, ephemeral and multiple dimension, combining movement, music, dress and social gatherings. The painting is a more interior experience, often quiet, introspective and mostly visual (it depends on the paintings, of course). The two nevertheless have in common to extract us from the experience of everyday life, to ask questions and to question our relationship to reality.
What is fashion looking for in collaborating with artists like Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons? It seeks new inspirations in terms of textile patterns, but above all it sets out to conquer artistic added value provided by the backing of artists . The aesthetic displacement that artists operate by appropriating, diverting, or canceling the functionality of fashion objects, is sought by creators. The most obvious example is that of the Louis Vuitton bags hijacked by the Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury in 2000. The artist took the shape of the Speedy to make a sculpture in chromed bronze; the brand in turn takes up the mirrored print to sell a new “Speedy mirror” bag. The circle is complete: art comments on the idolatry aroused by luxury objects, which in turn takes up artistic transformation to reintegrate critical commentary into a refined aesthetic gesture. Some gain in renewal of the commercial line, others in media notoriety. But art has sometimes become a creative agent and we have seen the emergence of collaborations that are as pointless and superfluous as they are useless and downright mediocre.
Gucci and Jacquemus called on painters to illustrate their campaigns. What does it bring compared to photographs? I think it contributes to the revival of fashion illustration, especially on social networks like Instagram. Image consumers are always looking for a form of authenticity by hand, and nothing better than that of painters or graphic designers with a well-identified style. With Gucci, this is part of the Italian tropism of ancient art (the masters of the Italian Renaissance). Jacquemus is part of this same ostentatious vein of the French Riviera, with a very 1980s American pop side, with Chloe Wise's paintings reminiscent of the hushed worlds of Alex Katz. In any case, the challenge for these campaigns is to erase any commercial display, by trying to highlight disinterested artistic creation. And not the shoulder bag from the next collection!