Fashion has been considered an art form since it began drawing crowds to the runway. Today it is in its own category separate from music and art, but should it be? I stumble across evidence of the marriage of art and fashion on numerous occasions. Countless designers have made their statement the same way that artists have – they borrow from each other’s territory on a regular basis and what they come up with is worth the confusion.
Jum Nakao is a self-proclaimed fashion designer and engineer. During São Paulo’s Fashion Week 2005, he created paper dresses. Creating the dresses took over 700 hours and almost one ton of paper to produce. Then, on the day they were presented, they were ceremoniously ripped up on the cat walk. In the Creators Project interview, Nakao says the material doesn’t have to be expensive or everlasting, “It shows people that their values need to be reanalyzed, that materiality doesn’t matter. That is why we destroy everything, to show that there is something more important, something much more lasting than what people see and value at first sight.”
In 2012, costume design for ballet took on a new level. Gareth Pugh designed costumes as visual art pieces for the ballet “Carbon Life.” The ballet got a mediocre review, but the costume design was praised. The Huffington Post said “Still, no one can deny that Pugh’s costumes make ordinary humans look like human-bug hybrids of the future who will hypnotize the rest of us into serfdom.”
Now Zatista artists are dabbling in fashion inspired art. Kathleen Ney creates sketches and paintings of woman’s clothing that reflects her background in design. Here, she’s depicting classic fashion themes in “Little Black Dress Fashion Sketch Painting” and “Costume Fashion Illustration Painting.” The lines and colors mirror the considerations of runway fashion designers.
Joel Degrand has a collection of photos dedicated to the outside world and the inside world colliding. He captures the dresses in store windows and the reflection of the world that stares at them in his series “Window Dressing.” He says, “from the onset of this series the intent of the photographs was not to imply any notion that consumerism, no matter how it is hyped, is good or bad. I am simply taking a closer look and examining the complexities of how we perceive and visualize what goes on in store windows.”
Zatista knows the impact that Fashion and Art have on each other. We have started an Art in Fashion Pinterest board where we collect the pins that fall in both categories. Each pin had an interesting way of bridging the gap between worlds.
Fashion and art have always been side by side the world of creative thinkers. With fashion designers taking on art galleries and artists designing dresses for paintings, we’ve cross the boundaries and we’re noticing just how much art and fashion have in common.
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