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FASHION
ART
A new exhibition on Harper’s Bazaar at Paris’s
Musée des Arts Décoratifs looks at how a magazine devoted to fashion
wound up making art history. By Stephen Mooallem
“PICASSO’S GOAT! Little Alexander, with a
glass of Scotch whisky in one hand, lolls on the
base of Picasso’s immortal bronze goat. His other
hand is hooked like a coat hanger over the nose
of the goat as if he intends to hang forever from
this baggy-dugged milestone of Culture in the
lobby of the Museum of Modern Art.”
That scene is from the beginning of a
November 1964 piece in Harper’s Bazaar by Tom Wolfe called “The New Art Gallery
Society,” about a party to celebrate the reopening of MoMA, which had been closed
for six months for the construction of a new wing. At the time, art openings in New
York were society events that attracted all manner of artist, gallerist, institutionalist,
patron, critic, swan, scion, politico, celebrity, press agent, gossip columnist, scrapper, and
striver, along with scene-makers like Wolfe, who feasted on the pageantry. But the image
of a young man louchely propping himself up on a late-career work by one of the 20 th
century’s most famous artists also aptly describes what has often been perceived as the
relationship between fashion and art: one always leaning on the other, like Brad Pitt
and LDC’s characters in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, their roles forever reversing.
As with most relationships, though, the reality is far more complex. The new exhibition,
“Harper’s Bazaar: First in Fashion,” on view now through July 14 at the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs in Paris, explores Bazaar’s role in documenting and shaping the history of
fashion. But it also reveals the magazine’s vast constellation of connections to the art
world. The show looks at fashion very much how one might look at art—in a curated
way designed to surface subtexts, narratives, and concepts. That, in itself, is relatively
new: Fashion was long considered more of a decorative art than a fine one. But in Bazaar,
fashion, like art, has always been about the building of a visual language beyond cuts
and patterns that can get us to think differently about who we are and how we live.
From its founding in 1867 , Bazaar has always viewed fashion in the context of cul-
ture. Early on, the magazine regularly published fiction, poetry, and essays alongside its
regular style and beauty coverage, a practice that continued into the next century. ➤THE OF
Style star. A series of limited-edition covers by Cindy Sherman, March 2016. ARTWORK: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK