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 A Tale of Two Fashion Weeks
TIME followed two sets of fashion professionals to see exactly what happens |
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The Hip Factories
An exclusive look inside the temples of fashion that are the must-haves of today's designers |
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Frock
Shocks
The Haute Couture shows mean the most beautiful clothes in the world —
and the worst |
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Lauren Invasion What's behind Ralph's move into Europe?
07/29/2002
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TIME for Fashion The art — and business — of fashion
04/2002
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Clothes
That Say It All
Europe's first intelligent garments aren't cheap Jan.
7, 2001
Battle
of the Boring
Haute couture's old guard holds sway. Who cares? Jul.
23, 2001
Belgium's
Fashion Fete
Antwerp throws a $5 million party Jul. 2, 2001
Made
to Measure
Popular Spanish fashion group Inditex targets a new market May.
14, 2001
Putting
Sparks in Marks
British fashion brand M&S loses touch Apr. 15,
2001
Clothes
Vs. Fashion
Should it be art or commerce? Apr. 5, 2001
In
the Bag
Gucci's acquisitions create a stable of haute labels Apr.
2, 2001
With
Family Like This...
The strange tale of the Gucci dynasty Apr. 2, 2001
Born-Again
Christians
Is there room in the house of Dior for two designers? Feb.
12, 2001
Frock
Wars
If sales are an afterthought, how do you know who wins Feb.
5, 2001
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Polo.com
Ralph Lauren's online fashion and home design store
fashion.net
Features a fashion-specific search engine, news, message boards, chat, job listings
fashionwiredaily
Fashion news-wire, updated daily. Requires free registration.
The Fashion Page
Viewpoint on fashion styles, and trends, by Lynda Stretton |
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ANNIKA LARSSON/TIMEPIX
DON'T MOVE: The girls wore Gucci in Vanessa Beecroft's "Show," which featured 20 models standing around at the Guggenheim in 1998 for two-and-a-half hours
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You may see an armless, headless mannequin here, another there, perhaps draped with the shredded remains of a toga, as if it's a decapitated Venus de Milo wearing the latest in Roman revival. An attendant stands guard, discreetly, in some corner. It reminds you of a place you visited, maybe on a hot summer afternoon, when you felt like doing something cultural — and, let's confess, wanted some air conditioning. You remind yourself: it's a shop. A clothes shop. But it feels an awful lot like an art gallery.
Emulation, of course, is the greatest form of admiration, and fashion loves art. Design houses these days are giving artists new canvases (or cottons or leathers) to work on and making them fashion stars. Museums are devoting exhibitions to the craft and its craftsmen, sometimes looking at fashion alone, sometimes juxtaposing it with art. It hasn't always been this way, but the dialogue between the two worlds is stronger than ever. This interaction creates debate and friction; in these creative realms, that's a good thing. But while fashion may be artsy, artistic, artful, enjoying an art-infused moment and even (gasp!) influential in certain art circles, it's not art.
That they're even mentioned in the same breath is something of a change. Fashion and art were once like two grande dames at a cocktail party. Each knew the other was there (and looked fabulous); neither deigned to acknowledge the other. "All century, it was thought that fashion did not belong when one talked about visual languages," says Ingrid Sischy, who, with Germano Celant and Luigi Settembrini, organized the Florence Biennale, the landmark art-and-fashion show in 1996. "The conventional wisdom was that fashion was the enemy of art." There were flashes of détente — Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian dress, for instance. But such moments were few and passed quickly, as if they were just creative air kisses.
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Art and fashion get along like the couples whom nobody expects to stay together |
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Avant-garde designers who emerged in the 1970s and '80s began pushing boundaries. Conceptually minded pioneers like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) challenged convention, and Issey Miyake landed on the cover of Artforum magazine, then edited by Sischy, who recalls that "people went wild." But at least they were talking, and the discussion lasted throughout that decade and into the next: What do artists do, and what do designers do? How do they think about their work? What's similar? What's different? In 1996, Sischy, Celant and Settembrini capitalized on the interest and organized the Florence show. For the centerpiece of this experiment in art-fashion togetherness, designers were paired with artists — Miuccia Prada with Damien Hirst, Azzedine Alaia with Julian Schnabel, Gianni Versace with Roy Lichtenstein — and told to work in the same space. Some of the pairs actively collaborated. Some played off each other. Still others carefully divided their workspace and went in their own creative directions. Some observers said the whole Biennale was pretentious or ill-conceived, but many — especially in the fashion world — found it thought-provoking, timely and a sign of things to come. "Unbelievable and fantastic," recalls Linda Loppa, the doyenne of the Antwerp fashion scene. "There was more debate. People said, 'Let's face it. We are different.'"
But how? To figure that out, you have to ask that annoying eternal question: "What is art?" "That's what it's really about, but I don't ask myself what art is anymore," says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which has just one article of clothing, a dress by Mariano Fortuny, in its collection. Easier, maybe, is to think about what fashion has to do that art doesn't. "The issue is function," says Claire Wilcox, curator of the Gianni Versace retrospective that opens Oct. 7 at London's V&A Museum. "Fashion is a handicraft, which has to function on the body. It has a different intention from that of art." She says one challenge of curating fashion is that clothes, unlike art, were never meant just to be looked at or to be inert. That's not their natural state. Antonelli agrees. "Designs have to function," she says. "Otherwise they're crap."
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