1990

THE ASPECTS OF ART'S PRESENCE IN FASHIONT

Art and fashion exist as two completely separate concepts with their own established identities, yet they are also in a constant interrelationship. For fashion designers, art represented an inexhaustible source of inspiration through the direct or indirect adoption of stylistic motifs: expressive, surreal, optical or postmodern during the 1980s.
Similarly, art, or more specifically artists, are present in various ways within the world of fashion. These connections can be followed through the history of art and costume from their earliest occurrences. The art from certain periods serves as the only surviving record of fashion trends of the time, and many examples show the costume itself as the main subject of the artist's expression. This is typical of the Mannerist period, where one might think of the Italian painter Bronzino, and especially of the Rococo and Rocaille periods, when the model's costume takes centre stage in genre scenes of high society life. In the works of some artists, such as the renowned royal portraits by Velásquez or Goya, costume functions as a lens through which the morals and character traits of social classes and eras are reflected. Fashion has always played an important role in the history of painting.
At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, amid the general changes of that transitional period, artists played a significant role in shaping fashion. Artists created garments, costumes, and textile design patterns as an integral part of their utopian visions of a new society, a new aesthetic order, and behaviour, which also corresponded to the ideological tenets of the artistic movements of the time.
Artists of Futurism (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni), Russian Constructivism (Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Alexandr Rodchenko), Cubist-Orphism (Robert and Sonia Delaunay), and the Bauhaus (Oskar Schlemmer) were proponents of brilliant solutions for everyday fashion and theatrical costume. In that era, these were bold, avant-garde forms, based on the principles of breaking down and reassembling colouristic relationships and geometries derived from the figures of the square, cross and circle. The link between fantasy and fashion is particularly striking in Dadaist and Surrealist ensembles, when the designer Elsa Schiaparelli, in collaboration with Jean Cocteau and Dalí, created a series of chic and shocking designs in the late 1930s, whose main motif was to present, in a fun, provocative, and offensive manner, to question the status of conventional fashion, and indeed all prevailing norms and conservative settings. One of the most extreme examples is the Dali hat shaped like a woman's shoe, or the dresses that had the illusion of numerous holes, such as the “Tear-Dress”. During the 1940s, the Surrealists appeared in the pages of fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, which was not always positively received by the critics.
A similar attitude exists towards artistic fashion photography, which is most often viewed as commercial regardless of its aesthetic, innovative or experimental value. Notable in this field are Man Ray, Diana Arbus, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and others.
During the 1950s and 1960s, another form of artistic activity within fashion emerged: the design of window displays for famous fashion houses or department stores. Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol are just a few of the many artists who provided interesting artistic solutions within the window display space.
At a time when technology seemed an exciting promise of better art and a better future for the world, kinetic art, pop art, and op art represented a breakthrough on the art scene. The Italian artist Getulio Alviani, who creates total fashion design, should certainly be mentioned here.
In the 1970s, new ideologies in art promoted the artist as a first-person subject: the performer, the transformer, the behaviourist artist. Here, one can speak of the artist as a social or fashion object, recognised by their iconic style of dressing. Joseph Beuys can be seen as a shaman and an archetypal figure of this era, and, at the other extreme, the Italian artist Luigi Ontani, who creates his persona through travesty, exhibitionism, and mythological references to proper image and way of self-fashioning.
Over the past decade, within the postmodern era of the 1980s, the relationship between art and fashion has expanded to include broader fields such as architecture, design, photography, video, performance, and film. 
The renowned figure of expressive ‘bad painting’, Julian Schnabel, designs the interiors of Alaïa's boutiques in New York, including the benches and clothes rails, where the characteristics of his raw painterly style and his experimentation with various materials are clearly visible.
The presence of art in the realm of fashion is evident in the now-perfectly-natural and regular features of artists and art in the most famous fashion magazines, such as Vogue. Increasingly, museums and galleries are hosting exhibitions of costumes or jewellery created by contemporary artists. 
Both art and fashion are inseparable from contemporary life, and it is quite certain that they will cross the boundaries of their respective movements.
After all, like all other media, art multiplies the effect of fashion, making it more universal, elevating its sense and meaning. And one could also speak in the reverse direction, about the influence of fashion... but that is another topic...

Published in the literature and culture magazine Venac, issued by “Dečije Novine” in Gornji Milanovac, the largest publishing house for youth in Yugoslavia.