Is fashion art? That centuries-old question is addressed in “Costume Art,” the new exhibition that set this year’s Met Gala theme. Whatever your thoughts on the subject, fashion’s fascination with fine arts is well-documented. Maybe that can be partly explained as the attraction of opposites, the eternal (ars longa) versus the ephemeral.
Looking back in history, we see that Madame Grès and Madeleine Vionnet, using draping and bias cutting respectively, channeled classical ideals of beauty. Elsa Schiaparelli worked in tandem with Surrealists to create pieces that spoke to the interwar years. Among Yves Saint Laurent’s many tributes to art—which included references to Piet Mondrian, the Ballets Russes, Georges Braque, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso—was one to Schiap herself. Zooming forward, when Marc Jacobs was at Louis Vuitton in the 2000s, his high-profile collaborations with Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Prince set the template for innumerable art-fashion mash-ups to come. Some of these have been collected to form a fashion lover’s intro to art history.
Andy Warhol
