When fashion and art collide
Artists and couturiers have had an uneasy relationship – yet art continues to be seen on the catwalks, writes Kelly Grovier
Kelly Grovier
Sometimes a lobster is just a lobster. In 1937, however, the crustacean became an intriguing case study in the complicated relationship between art and fashion. It all started when the Spanish surrealist, Salvador Dal, and the legendary Italian fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, teamed up to create a silk summer evening dress. The gown, which featured a print of an oversized lobster (his idea) that dangled down from the waist, clawed its way into cultural consciousness when the American socialite Wallis Simpson wore it for a photoshoot in Vogue magazine.
It was the most shocking message Simpson could send in the wake of Edward VIIIs abdication
In May 1937, all eyes were on Simpson. Preparing to divorce for a second time and currently engaged to Edward VIII (who felt forced to abdicate the British throne to marry her), Simpsons reputation had taken a beating in the press and was in desperate need of a makeover. Posing for Vogues celebrated photographer, Cecil Beaton, in a gown co-designed by one of contemporary arts most sought-after figures, could send a signal that she represented a bold new way of thinking.
But a lobster? In retrospect the symbolism could hardly have been more risky or risqu. In recent years the invertebrate (traditionally regarded as an aphrodisiac) had emerged in Dals art as a complex psychological emblem laced with daring sexual undertones. Those connotations would eventually become explicit a few years later when, in 1939, Dal designed a swimming thong for his pavilion at the Worlds Fair, The Dream of Venus, for which the lobsters hard exoskeleton and ragged claws were strapped like chastity belts across the crotches of topless models who swam around a tank. In Dals overheated imagination, the lobster was associated with violent emasculation arguably the most shocking possible message Simpson could wish to send in the wake of Edwards abdication.
Whether Simpson or Beaton were fully conscious of the innuendoes packed into Dals lobster is anyones guess. But they likely would have known that the symbolism was far from innocent.
What motivates artists is the desire to create an object or image that is timeless
The friction between Dal and Schiaparelli reveals an inevitable conflict between the aspirations of the artist and those of the designer. What motivates artists is the desire to create an object or image that is timeless a work that transcends trend. Designers, on the other hand, rely for their very livelihood on the mutability of taste. By definition, their work is seasonal, if not disposable, and depends upon the constant flux of what is considered fashionable. Any attempt to wed art with fashion is arguably destined to trigger tensions between the craving for permanence and the need for transience.
Monetising meaning
Sometimes that collision of sensibility is comical. Sometimes it is confrontational. Take Yves Saint Laurents famous adaptation, for a series of six day dresses that the French designer unveiled in 1965, of the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrians soulful grids. Though Saint Laurent insisted he was a great admirer of the purity he detected in Mondrians distinctively austere style, which is characterised by a simplicity of line and elegance of colour, his eagerness to commodify that aesthetic as a luxury garment is at odds with what the Dutch painter believed.
Mondrian believed that through his art he could help the world free itself from a growing dependence on disposable material objects. Living as a kind of secular monk whose only indulgence was jazz music, Mondrian inhabited a series of austere one-room studio-flats that resembled the spare serenity of his paintings. Within the tight perimeters of these quadrate cells Mondrian squeezed the primary colours of his ascetic existence: eating, sleeping, dancing and working. Through his painting he hoped to awaken a sensitivity to the underlying patterns of being.
Mondrian hoped to draw focus to the permanence of the soul
Fascinated by the teachings of the Russian occultist, Madame Blavatsky, whose portrait was among Mondrians very few possessions, Mondrians esoteric thinking was aligned with that of the soulful Theosophical Society that Blavatsky founded. He was especially drawn to the conviction that there are spiritual laws that underpin our existence and that these higher rhythms are in conflict with the crass commercialism and political conflicts in which the world finds itself endlessly embroiled. Through his art, Mondrian hoped to draw focus away from the distractions of the fleeting material world to the permanence of the soul.
Saint Laurents repurposing of Mondrians signature style may have been at odds with the works spirit but it couldnt tarnish the Dutch artists reputation. After all, Mondrian had died nearly two decades before the French designers 1965 autumn/winter collection caused a stir, and, unlike Dal, Mondrian never consented to the collaboration in the first place. He couldnt be accused of selling out. The same could not be, and was not, said about Pablo Picassos decision, half a century earlier, to design costumes for Sergei Diaghilevs Ballet Russes. Reeling from the collapse of two love affairs in Paris, Picasso was desperate for a change of scene and relocated to Rome in the latter stages of World War One. There, he met and soon afterwards married the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova a dancer in Diaghilevs company.
Picasso and Khokhlova were both involved in the 1917 ballet Parade, conceived by the French writer Jean Cocteau. The bold and boxy costumes that Picasso contributed to the production are a jumble of urban structures, like skylines sprouting legs. Their resemblance to the angular forms that crowd Picassos Cubist paintings was lost on no one. For those who believed that Cubism represented the breaking down of conventional and socially enforced ways of perceiving the world, Picassos attraction to the privileged circles of theatre-going Rome was dispiriting. While he was rubbing shoulders with playwrights and dancers, his co-founder of Cubism, George Braque, was having his skull trepanned to alleviate the pain of the serious head injury he had suffered fighting for the French Army in the war.
Picassos Cubist followers, according to the artists biographer, John Richardson, were horrified that their hero should desert them for the chic, elitist Ballets Russes.
Selling out?
Must the marriage of art and design always involve such friction? Its a question worth asking as the collaboration between artists and the tastemakers of the fashion world has only accelerated in recent years. Often the symbiosis is more confounding than invigorating, particularly when the designer merely invokes the essence of an unwitting old master. Vivienne Westwoods autumn/winter 2016/17 collection, according to its promotional blurb, has been heavily influenced by the artists Donatello and El Greco. How that debt actually obtains in the look of the designs themselves is rather less clear. What the claim does succeed in doing is thread Westwoods fabric with a cultural seriousness it might otherwise lack. It makes you look a little closer.
Perhaps it says something about the shifting priorities of contemporary art that the collaboration between painters and sculptors working today with leading designers does not seem as inherently fraught as in early eras. As contemporary art has gradually embraced ephemerality and the perishability of culture as an aesthetic element, finding common ground with the endless turnover of catwalk merchandise has become less compromising.
Thats not to say there arent some surprises. The partnership between the late fashion guru Alexander McQueen and the British artist Damien Hirst, for whom grotesque shapes of death (including pickled sharks) are recurring motifs, remind us that however impeccably dressed the Virgin Mary may be in Medieval altarpieces, there is always a skull lolling at her feet, troubling the scene. BBC
