Bazaar
STYLE
No longer ju st an af ter-school project,
the collage is getting a high-fashion
makeover. We asked some of our
favourite visual artists to create their
own works, inspired by this season’s
biggest runway trends.
&
The internet is a dynamic
space that allows for much
innovation and creation.
In this online world,
Instagram has gained
prominence as a visual
playground for millions of
users, particularly artists.
The app has opened up
previously inaccessible
channels for those looking
to reach industry leaders,
new audiences, and new sources of inspiration.
An interesting trend to emerge out of Instagram is the rise
of the collage. For the past few years, the playful medium that
lived in scrapbooks has made a comeback in a big way,
especially in fashion. This art form is increasingly being used
by designers and brands to create lookbooks, campaigns, and
other visual identities. Brands such as Chanel, Stella McCartney,
and Céline have all worked with collage at some point, and
most recently, both Coach and Kenzo used the technique for
their Spring/Summer 2018 campaign imagery.
One possible reason for the emergence of the collage is
the excessive visual matter in our daily lives, much of it
coming from advertising and media. Fashion imagery, in
particular, is a rich source of material for collage artists who
mix and match elements from various sources to create
surreal new worlds that play with fashion’s more fantastical
side. By simply taking an image out of its original contextand placing it in a new
setting, collage artists can
tell their own version of
a story and make the
image evoke an entirely
new response in a viewer.
Another reason why
collage is attractive to artists
is the wide scope it offers
for experimentation and
collaboration, and the fact
that it allows each artist to
develop their own distinct style. Besides, there’s also the
undeniable appeal of not being bound to a specific palette or
structure and the medium’s general no-rules, DIY-style
aesthetic. Collage bridges the gap between analogue and
digital, giving artists a relatively easy art form through which
to explore multiple themes at one go.
To celebrate the medium, we’ve asked four visual artists to
create their own unique works interpreting Spring/Summer
2018’s most exciting trends. From Sarah Kaushik’s experiments
with vintage imagery to graphic designer Ayesha Kapadia’s optical
illusions or even California-based collage artist Patrick Keohane’s
homage to checks, the future of this incredible medium definitely
looks promising. As Jean-Luc Godard says, “It’s not where you
take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
The writer is founder of the newsletter The Alipore Post, and
editor of Design Fabric, an art and design publication.
By Rohini Kejriwal