The Fashion Businessthe ready-to-wear collection with specially made artisanal pieces. In ‘Addressing
the Century’ the Margiela exhibits were included in the final section,
‘Convergence’, along with others by Issey Miyake, Roberto Capucci and Rei
Kawakubo. According to Clare Coulson’s review of the exhibition in Fashion
Theory,‘These designers consciously resist categorisation. They want their
work to exist where form and function are harmoniously fused and ideas
flow freely. Their work is both art and fashion’.^40
This illustrates a tendency which is currently very popular with students of
fashion design. In the year of writing, there are a number of final-year students
at Kingston University alone whose dissertations suggest that certain avant-
garde designers’ work might be regarded in a different context, and subjected
to a different critique, namely that of art.^41 I have noticed that some students
consider an elite of avant-garde designers such as Comme des Garcons, Yohji
Yamamoto and Martin Margiela as being exempt from, or superior to the
commercial considerations to which others are subject. There is a tendency
to look at the word of these designers more as vehicles for self-expression
than as products conceived, consciously or unconsciously to appeal to a group
of people who are consumers. Like Luigi Maramotti, I believe that a designed
garment becomes ‘fashion’ only when it has passed through some kind of
system and became a product.^42 Those arresting pieces created solely for impact
in a fashion show or exhibition, might possibly qualify as art, but are certainly
not, in my opinion, fashion, and I am not alone in thinking so. When asked
about this subject in a newspaper interview, Maison Margiela stated its view
that fashion is ‘a craft, technical know-how and not, in our opinion an art
form’.^43 When I asked why it felt commentators have become so fixated by
the fashion and art question, Maison Margiela explained to me that:
We live in a period in which we tend to prefer to over associate and interpret
events, issues and movements in culture and taste rather than ‘under-interpret’
them. There are, in our opinion, two main ways of forcing a link between the
worlds of art and fashion, firstly the artistic references of any one garment or
group of garments, the second is the artistic quality of any one designer’s approach
to their work and their expression as a creator of clothing. The more individualistic- Coulson, C., ‘Exhibition Review: Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art & Fashion,
the Hayward Gallery’,Fashion Theory, vol. 3, issue 1, Oxford: Berg, 1999, pp. 121–6. - The students in the 1999-2000 academic year whose dissertations touch on relationships
between art and fashion include Mallison, E. (an investigation of the relationship between
Art, Craft and Fashion in late 20th century Britain) and Marin, L. (The discourse of veiling
and the work of Zineb Sedira). - Maramotti, L., ‘Connecting Creativity: chapter 6 of this book.
- Frankel, S., ‘Reality Check’,The Independent Magazine 15 August, 1999, pp. 35–9.