Art + Fashion 2.0

Courtesy J.F. & Son
A piece from artist K8 Hardy's “J’Approve” collection for textile designers J.F. & Son

By Darrell Hartman
Published: February 19, 2010

NEW YORK—It was the second-to-last day of Fashion Week, and K8 Hardy was in Soho modeling her new “J’Approve” collection for textile designers J.F. & Son. Well, to say that Hardy, a performance artist best known for plastering blown-up pages of her DIY fashion magazine on the walls of Tate Modern last year, was “modeling” the clothes does not do her presentation justice. Posing in thrift store-inspired ensembles ranging from boxy, raw-canvas dresses to cone bras and stage-ready accessories — a look she’s incorporated into her past work — the artist adopted different characters as she appeared in her comical outfits, seeming less like a Kate Moss on the catwalk than a Cindy Sherman in her studio.


The fashion and art worlds have been long been intimately intertwined, but over the last half decade their union metastasized to an unusually visible level. During the boom years, Richard Prince, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and other blue-chip artists turned out collaborative projects with some of the world’s most distinguished fashion houses — efforts that often resembled strategic luxury partnerships more than creative endeavors. Though times have changed, the collaborations have not stopped. In fact, they may have increased. But for the most part, the art-fashion collaborations being unveiled this spring are — like Hardy’s — characterized by designers turning to younger, lesser-known artists in search of edgy, pretty, or just plain fresh infusions.



Last month in Paris, menswear designer Adam Kimmel had models walk around his casino-themed presentation at Yvon Lambert Gallery in latex masks inspired by the freakish creations of resurgent downtown painter George Condo. Levi’s latest artistic help has come not from Hirst, as in 2007, but from the downtown photographer Ryan McGinley, who not only worked with the brand on its free-spirited “Trampoline” ad campaign but also collaborated with SoHo’s ultra-hip Opening Ceremony line on a series of throws.



For the recently launched JF & Son, working with Hardy was an appropriately lo-fi way of adding some artistic élan to its artisanal reputation. “Textiles don’t always get considered in the same way” as art, said the company’s Travis Boyer, who organized Hardy’s show. “It gets lumped into these other categories of craft.” In a similar appeal for art-world credibility, designer Brian Reyes asked Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas to create bosky prints and an arboreal backdrop for his Fall-Winter 2010 collection. “I liked that she’s really interested in the universe, in the cosmos, and it’s really nice to talk to somebody that is in a different world but has a very similar mindset,” Reyes said. “I gave her my inspiration, she sent proposals, and I went with things that would fit my story — my girl, and her tale.”



According to Harold Koda, the head curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the recent proliferation of artist-designer collaborations is a product of a postmodern creative landscape in which “fashion or fine arts became a playground of ideas.” In previous eras, artists — with a few exceptions, such as in the Surrealist circle — worked with fashion designers more often as muses than as full collaborators. Before he became a noted Fauvist, for instance, Raoul Dufy made prints for the designer Paul Poiret. That is no longer the norm, according to Koda. “I think post-Warhol, where art is business, all those lines get blurred and it becomes an opportunity to really play and work with people you admire,” he said. “It’s not going to Frank Stella and saying, ‘I want colored stripes.’ It’s an active engagement with a fellow traveler.”



And while the downturn has reduced the bling factor of these partnerships, bohemian sensibilities and low overhead have allowed emerging artists to adjust to the post-recession Zeitgeist more quickly than designers, said Scope Art Show founder Alexis Hubshman — lending them even greater appeal as creative partners. “I'm seeing more authenticity, sincerity, gravity,” Hubshman said of the post-bust climate. “When that chair, the financial backing, is pulled out from under you, you can go back to your roots as an artist. I don't know if you can say that about fashion.”


Due to the simple overlay involved, handbags and prints are unsurprisingly two of the most common routes to fashion for artists. Ben Eine — a British street artist with a distinctly lower profile than Prince or Emin — added some typographical flair to London-based handbag designer Anya Hindmarch’s Spring-Summer 2010 collection. Korean-born designer Sang A, meanwhile, invited 15 artists to embellish her signature Flash clutch for a charity event at Mixed Greens Gallery on Monday night. (She plans to collaborate with two of them, Daren Neman and Stephen Campbell, again in the future.) And partnering with an artist they’ve worked with before, Andy & Debb revealed two new looks using a delicate print by Korean painter Mori Kim, who also patterned a ginkgo biloba-leaf fabric for the same collection.


There are some designers, like Threeasfour and Thakoon, who have built collaborations with artists — and artistic approaches generally — so deeply into their practice that they they inhabit a liminal space between art and fashion. (Threeasfour, for those who don’t know, are the trio of designers who transferred Yoko Ono’s dot drawings onto cotton and silver last fall, inviting the experimental artist to preside over their fashion show.) But most designers seem content to use artists as reliable conduits into other reaches of the creative sphere. Last year, for the third straight season, Zac Posen commissioned half a dozen works from painter Rosson Crow to use as inspiration for his collection. “I think it’s great for artists to expand their practice outside whatever it is you’re doing,” Crow says of her work with Posen. “But I guess I think about how it will look repeated as a pattern, but not about how it would look on the body,” she added. “That’s the designer’s problem.” Perhaps some vestiges of a line still remain between art and fashion remain after all.