Fashion

...modern fashion, like modern art is a catalyst for dialogue and an exchange of ideas

by Siska Lyssens Increasingly, in recent years and worldwide, fashion has been given a platform in spaces where art is traditionally showcased. Museums now display fashion with as much consideration as they do art. The hugely successful exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York firmly placed a fashion designer among traditional artists like the painter Claude Monet and gave as much prominence to evening gowns as to ancient art objects from centuries ago. Does it automatically follow that fashion can be considered an art form?

As with art, the cultural relevance of fashion as a mirror of the habits and tastes of times past needs no proof. Fashion as an artefact of culture teaches us about our and other societies’ histories. However, the line between fashion and art becomes more blurred when we look to more current instances of how fashion is presented.

Fashion has never been more accessible to the masses than it is today. When I interviewed Kaat Debo, director and curator at the Fashion Museum of Antwerp (MoMu), before the Maison Martin Margiela retrospective exhibition at Somerset House almost two years ago, she explained her experience: “We’ve had a wide range of visitors (in Antwerp), from children of school age to 80-year-olds, who recognize the creativity of the designer. That’s our goal: we don’t make exhibitions for a niche public only – the challenge is to speak to a large audience.”

The accessibility of fashion as a career has also taken the once quite sheltered profession of designer out of its artistic, exclusive sphere. The number of fashion students is on the rise and the creative process of fashion – from the studio to the runway show – has become more transparent because of media interest. To quote the journalist Glenn O’Brien, in a comment on the art world: "Today you have artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst who employ hundreds of people – it's a very understandable model for artists. And there are people in other fields like fashion, like Marc Jacobs, who has that sort of entrepreneurial sensibility." The interesting parallel that O’Brien explores here is the one between artists and fashion designers, and the similar methods they have adopted over time. Speaking of Warhol, O'Brien states: "One of Andy's great innovations was realising that the idea of the artist alone in his studio was not a particularly modern one, and that an artist could have a team.”

Today’s fashion industry plays by the same rules, but the validity of the finished product is considerably more problematic. It’s easy to proclaim that a Lucian Freud painting is art – it’s not quite so self-evident to claim the same of a dress designed by Karl Lagerfeld, even though they are contemporaries, both working in studios, surrounded by assistants and heckled by press. Both are forces to be reckoned with within their respective realms of creativity and both have been lauded by critics.

The democratization of fashion runs parallel with the democratization of art – and raises similar objections. In the case of fashion designers, however, in order to be taken seriously, it is more necessary to distinguish themselves as creating either ‘high’ or ‘low’

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