The Invisible ManFashion and ArtIt is significant that the 1999 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, ‘Addressing
the Century’, took as its theme, not the almost unimaginable cultural and
industrial prepotence which fashion has assumed over the last hundred years,
but its relationships with art. This is not so surprising, though, when viewed
against the recent spate of exhibitions and texts exploring the same theme,
and it is easy to understand, when it has so long been denigrated as a frivolous
and futile occupation, that fashion and its study should attempt to reposition
itself in a more legitimate context. Having, at least until recently, no
philosophy, critique or theory of its own, as Radford’s recent essay describes,
fashion has been inclined to appropriate those of others.^36
There have, of course, always been relationships between art and fashion,
as there have been between other fields in design, architecture, literature and
music. Where such links have existed, it has often been in the economic
interests of fashion to make them visible, and the original motives for such
associations may occasionally or often have been calculated to this end. As
Radford writes: ‘Certainly a cadre of designers have had their work exhibited
in specific contexts that identify their products as art rather than designed
commodities... recent cases of using artists for modelling or engaging them
to design the fashion show may be taken as instances of an attempt to procure
the potency of status by this magical association’.^37 Despite the obvious and
frequently cited arguments placing fashion in a different sphere from art on
grounds of its economic motives and its persistent denial of recently past
styles, there appears to be confusion in academic circles, amongst designers,
and in style magazines, where art and fashion have become ‘inextricably
interfused’, according to Radford.^38
Martin Margiela has frequently exhibited work in art galleries and
museums of modern art, contexts which invite art criticism.^39 Understandably,
then, ‘Addressing the Century’ included no fewer than three pieces of work
from Maison Margiela which were taken from a previous exhibition at the
Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1997) containing pieces from
- Radford, R., ‘Dangerous Liaison: Art, Fashion and Individualism’,Fashion Theory, vol.
2, issue 2, Oxford: Berg, 1998, pp. 151–64. - Ibid.
- Ibid.
- A ‘C.V.’ supplied by Maison Margeila showed that the company has shown work at
the Florence Biennale on Fashion and Art (1996), the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art (1999),
Musee de L’Art Moderne (1993), Musee de l’Art Contemporain de Marseille (1996), Fri-Art
Centre d’Art Contemporain, Kunsthalle, Friborg (1998), The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York (1999 and 2000).