Fashion Art

Increasingly, in recent years and worldwide, fashion has been given a platform in spaces where art is traditionally showcased. Museums now display fashion with as much consideration as they do art. The hugely successful exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York firmly placed a fashion designer among traditional artists like the painter Claude Monet and gave as much prominence to evening gowns as to ancient art objects from centuries ago. Does it automatically follow that fashion can be considered an art form?

As with art,the cultural relevance of fashion as a mirror of the habits and tastes of times past needs no proof. Fashion as an artifact of culture teaches us about our and other societies’ histories. However, the line between fashion and art becomes more blurred when we look to more current instances of how fashion is presented.

Fashion has never been more accessible to the masses than it is today. When I interviewed Kaat Debo, director and curator at the Fashion Museum of Antwerp (MoMu), before the Maison Martin Margiela retrospective exhibition at Somerset House almost two years ago, she explained her experience: “We’ve had a wide range of visitors (in Antwerp), from children of school age to 80-year-old, who recognize the creativity of the designer. That’s our goal: we don’t make exhibitions for a niche public only – the challenge is to speak to a large audience.”

Theaccessibility of fashion as a career has also taken the once quite sheltered profession of designer out of its artistic, exclusive sphere. The number of fashion students is on the rise and the creative process of fashion – from the studio to the runway show – has become more transparent because of media interest. To quote the journalist Glenn O’Brien, in a comment on the art world: "Today you have artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst who employ hundreds of people – it's a very understandable model for artists. And there are people in other fields like fashion, like Marc Jacobs, who have that sort of entrepreneurial sensibility." The interesting parallel that O’Brien explores here is the one between artists and fashion designers, and the similar methods they have adopted over time. Speaking of Warhol, O'Brien states: "One of Andy's great innovations was realizing that the idea of the artist alone in his studio was not a particularly modern one, and that an artist could have a team.”