#Fashion art work full#
#Fashion art work series#

Issey Miyake, the avant-garde designer behind the label bearing his name, is a loner among his contemporaries in his emphatic proclamation that he is “not a fashion designer.” He expanded on this notion to the Paris Voice: “Anything that's 'in fashion' goes out of style too quickly.

Like Lang, Takada’s visual art displayed elements of his earlier fashion creations: the paintings feature depictions of the artist himself dressed in various flower-printed kimonos, a signature motif that often decorated his collections as a designer.Ī single A-POC 'Le Feu' outfit debuting as the finale of Issey Miyake's Spring/Summer 1999 show in Paris. Choosing painting as his new medium of expression, Takada held a solo show of his large-scale works at Studio 55 gallery in Paris in 2010. Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada, founder of the high-end ready-to-wear brand Kenzo, also transitioned from fashion designer to visual artist after he sold his label to luxury good behemoth LVMH in 1993. Kenzo Takada in front of two of his paintings at Studio 55 Gallery, Paris 2010. Titled “Helmut Lang: Sculptures,” the show featured new works employing found objects to create tall, totemic structures that he painted in black and white, echoing his label's signature monochromatic palette and minimalist, architectural lines. In an interview with the New York Times just before the opening of the show, Lang explained that he was always “interested in materials and in transforming them.” The difference, he noted, between his work as a fashion designer and that as a visual artist, is that “as a fashion designer, he was ‘building around a body’ and now he is building the body itself.” In May 2012, Lang erected an exhibition in New York to coincide with the first installment of Frieze New York.

#Fashion art work series#

Three years later, after a fire destroyed a significant part of his label’s fashion archive, he shredded the remains of the garments to create a series of sculptures for an exhibition at East Hampton's aptly named Fireplace Project-a potent symbol of his determination to exchange fashion for art. In 2008, Lang held his first solo show at Kestnergesellshaft, an art gallery in Hanover, Germany, where he debuted his first sculptural creations. Rubber, Chalk, Steel.Īfter Prada acquired his eponymous label in 2005, Helmut Lang retired from fashion design and turned his attention toward the visual arts, holing up in his New York studio for several years with the goal of reinventing himself as an artist. Here's a look at four cutting-edge couturiers who have thrown themselves into the art world as visual artists-and whose work has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. However, a number of designers have also engaged with art in a more traditional manner, branching outside of fashion into such widely agreed-upon forms of fine art as sculpture and photography.

#Fashion art work full#

Last month, I examined the ongoing debate about whether fashion can be considered fine art, highlighting several designers who consider themselves to be artists, full stop, and their clothes to be works of art.