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2 3 4 THE FASHION DESIGN REFERENCE + SPECIFICATION BOOK
(Text)
Chapter 23: Art
The question should not be, Is fashion art? but rather, When is fashion art?
Fashion, after all, is a business in which design is responding to a functional
challenge. Many will argue that fashion’s production of utilitarian items that
are not exclusively an artistic expression—meant to stimulate the beholder’s
thoughts and emotions—disquali es it as an art form. But there are times
when fashion designers take their work to a place that can only be described
as art. Intent is at the core of the issue: What drives the designer? The very
fact that fashion stirs passionate debate around this question is enough to
give it a place at the table. Aesthetic value, it must be also be remembered,
is never universal, but always evolving in what it excludes or includes.
IN THE MUSEUM
Garments
Traditionally, museums have collected fashion drawings and garments (as a textile) only for
their historic value. The benefits of knowing what people wore within the context of when
they wore it slowly gained credibility as a reason for creating fashion archives. These sort of
fashion collections can both chronicle an era and document the lives and accomplishments of
iconic figures. For example, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s 2002 exhibit Jacqueline
Kennedy: The White House Years examined the First Lady’s influence on fashion and style at a
time when the world was watching every move she made and everything she wore.
At the same time, museums have put works traditionally categorized as fine arts into context
by showing the correlations between them and the design arts, including fashion design. For
example, the shift toward Cubism for artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and their
appreciation for clean lines, fragmented angular planes, and a sense of transparency might be
displayed in the flapper fashions of Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, and the Callot Soeurs.
Or an exhibit might pair the kinetic canvases of op art painters like Victor Vasarely and Bridget
Riley with the mod designs of Rudi Gernreich and Mary Quant.
Only in recent decades has the work of fashion designers been collected, studied, and dis-
played on its own merit. Museum shows might focus on the artistic contribution of designers
and examine their cultural and sociological impact in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries;
others shows might focus on innovations in garment making. For example, in 1983 the designs
of Issey Miyake, a leader in experimenting with the structure of garments and their relation to
the body, began to travel to art museums around the globe in the exhibition Bodyworks; his
work also appeared on the cover of Artforum, the first time clothes were given space in a ma-
jor art magazine.
Courtesy of James Hill/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston.
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