Last week in her very excellent newsletter (the only other one I even read anymore!), Rachel Tashjian told us that she doesn’t believe fashion is art. Well… I can’t believe I’m getting into it with GQ’s fashion critic, but I must disagree. Sometimes fashion is without a doubt art.
Fashion is like architecture, like crockery, like chairs. This isn’t some extended metaphor; very literally, these are all forms of making that serve primarily a practical purpose. A house shields us from the elements. A pot allows us to cook. A chair replenishes our strength. A shirt keeps us warm.
As with clothes, architecture, crockery and chairs emerged across cultures. They took on endemic vernaculars and then the elites (and the artists) got hold of them. Palaces, temples, monuments… The Heydar Aliyev Center, The Guggenheim, The Centre Pompidou. Grecian urns, Acoma seed pots, Wedgewood china… Jamie Porta Lara, Jessica Stoller, Rochelle Goldberg. The chesterfield, the divan, the Papasan… Wegner Wishbone, Eames Lounger, Ducaroy Togo… you get the picture.
What I guess I’m finding is that fashion is akin to craft. But when can it be art?
Let’s explore it in the Long Read… Enjoy! 🌞
xxSCREMES (Shawn)
The Roundup
Links to stories you should be reading this week
An impossibly prescient essay on the current mental state of fashion, from over 40 years ago, revisited (email me if you want the PDF). ✺ Alejandro Jodorowsky interrogates the primal source of human desire. ✺ Marc Sebastian and Rachel Hodin are making adorable beaded necklaces. ✺ The perennially online Patricia Lockwood is now curious about those who live their lives fully offline. ✺ Josh O’Connor interviews darling designer Steven Stokey-Daley.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
The Art of Fashion | Shawn Cremer | High Noon Original
Unlike painting or dance or poetry — mediums for which aesthetic value is the primary indicator and any socio-politico-cultural quality is secondary — fashion’s relationship to the aesthetic is essentially a secondary characteristic. We tend to forget this because the discourse on fashion spends a great deal of time on aesthetics. And why shouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be terribly interesting to always be reading about how a new line fits. People want to know how it feels, how it looks, how it moves (and more than ever, what type of status wearing it will convey). But at the end of the day, the clothes must fit; they must encase the body.
Despite its primary role as functional object, fashion absolutely can be art. But here’s the key: it is an art form that demands rigorous adhesion to this one overriding principle. It must work.
The midcentury literary critics Wimsatt & Beardsley famously wrote of poetry, “Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.” The same demand, I’d say, must be applied to fashion-art. There is much hype about ‘unwearable fashion’ and it is easy to assume that unwearability in fashion makes it art. No. Exactly the opposite.
Again from Wimsatt & Beardsley: “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” Nor is the design or intention of the designer an available or desirable standard for judging wearable art. As a matter of fact, a fashion designer who sets out to create a piece of art rather than an item of clothing will always fail.
There is plenty of bad art (genuinely every single NFT I’ve seen, for instance), but whether we like it or not, we still must admit that it is categorically art. There is, however, no bad fashion-art because fashion that sets out to be art and is bad is simply nothing. Rags.
So who creates fashion-art? Rei Kawukubo of course. And Issey Miyake. And Mugler. Nicholas Ghesquière failed over and over up until this fall. Mary-Kate and Ashley actually. And Phoebe Philo. (Art can still be minimal!) Ludovic de Saint-Sernin. Jonathan Anderson actually doesn’t make fashion-art, just really outrageous fashion.
Earlier this year, I spoke with a designer who has made fashion-art, Lauren Kovin.
Lauren grew up in a house that breathed art in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her father was a graphic designer before the Mac ever existed, literally cutting and pasting, drawing, and setting typefaces. Her mother filled their home with Memphis design and custom-made accents. They were collectors.
The memories of Lauren’s childhood and adolescence are filled with great fashion and, you guessed it, fashion-art. Charles Jourdan, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Margiela, Alaïa, Gaultier populate her stories.
Lauren left home for Parsons, where she created a portfolio — the Chance Collection — inspired by the music of the late avant-garde composer John Cage.
I took old fashion magazines and I took sharpie and I used I think four dice, and depending on the number, that determined the design detail. So this whole collage juxtaposed collections in all black in different black fabrics and textures [with my design details]. She looked at it (my old boss) and was like… [here Kovin can’t help but laugh] … ‘what is this?!’
Pastiche! Collage! One of my favorite forms of art! As I return to this conversation with Lauren this week, I’m drawing a connection to something Steven Stokey-Daley says in his interview with Josh O’Connor (see The Roundup)…
If you’ve got an image on your mood board, say it’s of a film from the 70s, and it’s a guy wearing a shirt and the shirt’s absolutely fab. Take the shirt, repurpose it, bring it back to life. This is the whole Diet Prada culture we’ve got now – do you know about Diet Prada? They call people out for referencing too heavily and stuff and it’s like, but that’s the whole point! That we can take references and reintroduce them into the world in our own way.
With her Chance Collection, Lauren very literally took pre-existing objects and built her new work atop them. Art if you ask me!
Art in the Broader Fashion Sphere
There is one other layer to the relationship between art and fashion that we must explore: that of the promotional.
For those of you who have been tuning into High Noon for a while, you’ll recognize that this is the element that I find perhaps the most interesting — the world, the mythology, the rules of engagement — of what a fashion house engenders.
Fashion shows are perhaps the most obvious type of art project in fashion’s sphere. Growing out of intimate affairs at the atelier into grand spectacles, certain fashion shows remain fixed in the collective conscience for years to come. Galliano’s last collection for Dior, SS2011, or much of early McQueen, for instance.
Ad campaigns occupy a similar space; think of the Mugler ads Nick Patlan referenced in the perfume issue or the Dior AW20 Haute Couture video I shared in High Noon Issue 1 or Balenciaga’s zine featured in Issue 36.
As for my conversation with Lauren Kovin, she launched Lauren Kovin Collection at the height of the blog era.
When I turned 30, my parents said, ‘you know you should really try to do your own line.’ And for the longest time, I was like, ‘I don’t want to have my own line; I don’t want to do it.’ And then, I decided to do it.
Her first collection consisted of pieces composed of hand-dyed bamboo jersey in corals, blues, and blacks. As Lauren describes that collection to me, she draws out the vowels in each word — ‘draping,’ ‘gathering,’ ‘flow,’ ‘feminine’ — I am without a doubt getting the idea.
For her Spring/Summer 2010 collection, Lauren and her then-boyfriend created a series of short videos at the home where she grew up. (See Watch, below.) The eight videos have a macabre, sort of uncanny valley timbre to them. The clothes are there, but it’s really all about mood. The house, the score, the lighting and image quality — they are all characters in these short films. Certainly, this is the type of fashion-art project that I gravitate toward.
And, of course, one of the most accessible places where fashion and art meet is Instagram. And to be honest, not that many fashion houses do Instagram well. Remember I mentioned Mary-Kate and Ashley earlier? Well, The Row has one of my favorite Instagram accounts. It’s like a wonderful archival collection of art that lives in the world of The Row.
Similarly, KOVIN’s Instagram is not all about the clothes. You feel like you’ve entered a combination mood board-curio case-style seminar. The reason is simple: it’s in her blood. Lauren inherited her parent’s capacity for collecting.
I’m a collector. I have old postcards that I’ve saved, old issues of Fruits, eclectic objects, so I kind of wanted [my Instagram] to be about that. And also art and contemporary culture. What inspires me? I want the Instagram to feel authentic, with my voice, and also feature the products, and also the lifestyle.
These types of accounts have started to become popular again, but those without the collector mindset so often miss the mark. (As an aside, since I’ve mentioned him, Josh O’Connor has a true collector’s Instagram.)
Perhaps creating fashion-art is a luxury that designers at heritage houses rarely get to enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, they can still make excellent clothes. But not fashion-art.
Through this investigation, it appears to me that fashion we can call art comes from a place of curiosity, of play, of “why not?” Which, after all, is the place that most good art (and yes, yes plenty of bad art) comes from.
Watch
This is the first in a series of banned commercials Lauren Kovin created at her childhood home for her SS10 collection.
Cheers
Since I started this issue with a @theprophetpizza reference, might as well end with one. #BOOKENDS! Elevate your classic G&T with the best of the best…it’s the GQ edition! It sounds good, it looks flashy, and it tastes expensive. What more can you ask?
The GQ
1.5 oz G’vine Gin
Top with Q Spectalular Tonic Water
Garnish with a wheel of lime. Sip sip.