Leonardo da Vinci made set designs for François I, and Paulo Veronese, who showed as much interest in physical theatre as theatre in his painting, designed the costumes for Sophocles' Oedipus Rex-the first staging of the play since antiquity-for the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, which was designed by Palladio. Since the Renaissance, which in art and culture is the beginning in the West of personal agency, invention, and authorship, artists played an important role in other fields that were only then designated as anterior to fine arts.īeing active in pageants and diversions was also a useful way of gaining favour with patrons, leading to prestigious commissions. Even today, 'fashionable' can be used in a negative sense where art is not.ĭevelopments in fashion itself and the growth of the relatively new discipline of fashion theory in the last few decades has reoriented this stance dramatically. Fashion was considered 'feminine' in a negative sense: fickle and vain. However, within the traditional art historical discourse that grew out of the end of the nineteenth century, to discuss fashion was undesirable or not a matter of concern. Rather it is taken as a given, albeit contested.įashion and art occupy different territories and are different kinds of industries with their respective economic flows. Contemporary debates, mainly by fashion theorists, tend to eschew a tone that attempts to plead a higher art-like status for particular items of fashion.
It is the last two terms that concern us here.
Finally, there is fashion and art, which discusses the many cross-overs between the two fields. The second is art and fashion, in which objects of fashion vie for, or achieve, the status of works of art. Curators and collectors seek the illusion of cohesion and drum up desirability in an art market whose diversity is too complex to ascribe a tenable set of values. This is a direct product of globalization. This has resulted in the recent need to make three subtle distinctions in terminology. While long given glancing mention, fashion’s intimate ties to art had only become seriously addressed in the last two decades or so, at the same time when art the art market was becoming noticeably beholden to corporate whim and thus tending toward a fashionability that has always been latent, but which is now explicit. They are discussed more in fashion circles than by critics and historians of art, for whom it is a common blind-spot.
The ties between fashion and art are close but are nonetheless fraught. What is the history of the at times agonistic relationship between art and fashion? History and Significanceįashion’s relationship with art is closely bound with the beginning of the ‘fashion system’ in the late eighteenth century, that is, in the transition from clothing and dress to fashion as a social and economic modulator of class and taste. Art has long been touted as superior to fashion. Fashion has made its way into prominent museums, and artists are being enlisted into high-profile fashion houses. It doesn't take much to see that the line between fashion and art has rapidly begun to collapse in the last two decades.
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