More Than Fashion: Madonna, circa 2007, clad in Christian Lacroix couture in a collaboration with Arianne Phillips and Steven Klein for W magazine.
For fashion watchers, the Met Costume Ball in New York Monday night may have offered more lows than highs. But certainly one of the peaks, even if only in terms of hype, happened hours before the red carpet rush at the museum, in the windows of Barneys New York, where the muse and heiress Daphne Guinness readied for the grand gala by swanning into her feathered Alexander McQueen confection before a live audience pressed up against the windows of the store.
Billed as performance art, it raised the question as to whether individuals such as Ms. Guinness who are so committed to their sartorial flights of fancy have transcended the act of mere dressing into something akin to, well, art.
The timing of this style theater in a department store window couldn't have come at a better time. The following evening, the MOCA Contemporaries, a fundraising-networking arm of the downtown temple to modern art, had its second lecture series, devoted to the convergence of clothes and pop culture as it relates to performance and visual art, "The Fashionable Body."
Converging in the screening room at CAA in Century City Tuesday night were panelists Arianne Phillips, the Academy Award and BAFTA-nominated costume designer and editorial stylist; Michael Schmidt, the costume and fashion designer; and Kimberly Brooks, portrait painter and founder of the Huffington Post's Arts section, who has been focusing her broad, vivid strokes on those behind the scenes in fashion with "The Stylist Series" (among the ongoing series, Arianne and yours truly). I served as moderator.
The fashion and art worlds have long been bedfellows. Certainly the relationship between the two have had particularly stunning results going back to the Surrealists and Dadaists, from Schiaparelli collaborating with Cocteau, Picasso and Dali, a tradition that goes on today with, say, Marc Jacobs' collaborations with Juergen Teller, Cindy Sherman, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and so on.
In fact, fashion has become a trendy leitmotif in art in recent years. And it seems as the patronage and collaborations between fashion houses and artists have exploded, so both worlds increasingly continue to mine one another for subject matter and payoffs among the public.
The two-hour conversation spent considerable time returning to the matter of artist versus craftsman, specifically the labels. While Kimberly embraced the idea of being an artist, Michael and Arianne narrowly accepted the latter, both insisting time and again that they hadn't mastered their skills enough to even be called a craftsman. The audience disagreed, and during the Q+A reiterated they both deserved to be called artists.
Not so undivided was whether Ms. Guinness could be called a performance artist. What was interesting was how a few vocal attendees determined that someone with the financial means and accessibility to fashion houses that Ms. Guinness possesses couldn't be lumped in the same exalted circle as, say, Leigh Bowery. To that, I responded with examples such as Marchesa de Casati, which, whether the label existed or not, was a performance artist of a kind during wealthier times, viewing the street and society as theaters for her fabulously absurd sartorials antics.
The epitome of the post-modern artist is the performance artist. These individuals challenge orthodox conceits of art and culture and social norms. From the bare minimum to the baroque, playing up the dramatic for maximum visual impact is integral to communicating an idea. So it's not surprising that clothes, cosmetics—the very tools of transformation that we all utilize to some extent daily—are instrumental in the performance artist's repertoire which aims to break the rules of the way we think, the way react, the way we respond. For this reason, we often consider the most sartorially eloquent and deft of style icons to also be a kind of performance artist. Because they go out on a limb in the way they wear a dress or their fingernails or a pair of shoes, they can be the gamechangers in the way we all dress or look.
Does money, or the lack thereof, determine the worth of an artist's work? Like it or not, of course, it does, whether the money is funding the work or acquiring the finished product.
But does the work inspire? Does it capture a moment that lives a lifetime in our individiual or collective consciousness? Those are the questions that prove far more challenging to answer than how much, or even what the creator considered herself. They are also exactly what Arianne and Michael, whether they like to be called craftsman or artists or neither, are.
Wish I had more time to go into greater detail here on last night's fabulous conversation. Thank you to the MOCA Contemporaries for inviting us, and to my fellow panelists for sharing their insight and precious time.
"Grace Coddington" by Kimberly Brooks
Metal mesh shorts silkscreened to resemble denim cut-offs conceived and created by Michael Schmidt for pop star Rihanna
