Titania Inglis: Fade From Green

By Sarah Scaturro

A favorite look from Titania Inglis' F/W 2012 collection.  Photographer: Dan Lecca

Fashion Projects has been a fan of Titania Inglis ever since she launched her eponymous label a few years ago, so it was such great news to hear that she had won the 2012 Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award for Sustainable Design.  While I initially thought of Inglis as an "eco" designer, it quickly became apparent that the term "eco" was simply too reductive for her design philosophy. For her, sustainability is not a gimmick, or just about sourcing yet another ecotextile. Rather, she is moving towards a concept of sustainability that emphasizes longevity, quality, and thoughtfulness.  We are very pleased to present this interview with Inglis, coming on the heels of her recent F/W 2012 fashion presentation at Eyebeam.

Fashion Projects: Congratulations on your recent Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award for Sustainable Design.  How has winning the award affected your business?

Titania Inglis: Thank you! Receiving the Ecco Domani award is such a dream come true — I didn’t believe it at first when I received the email telling me I’d won. It’s opened a lot of doors for me already within the fashion industry, and I was able to put together an incredible team for my show this season, including stylist Christian Stroble, makeup artist Lisa Aharon and hairstylist Ramona Eschbach, photographer Aliya Naumoff, set designer Ryan Crozier of Forgotten City — and collaborating on a series of leather body accessories with Bliss Lau, a designer whose innovative work I’ve admired for years.

Inglis making adjustments before her F/W 2012 presentation begins. Photographer: Georgina Southen

Your F/W 2012 collection presented a very cohesive vision, with a strong design vocabulary.  Having followed your work ever since you began designing, I’ve noticed that you’ve developed signature elements. Your garments exhibit a strong affinity for geometry, asymmetry, and minimalism and you also create an unexpected sense of architectural space through your precise pattern-cutting and juxtaposition of rigid and supple fabrics. Can you explain a little bit about your inspirations, techniques and processes? Where did you hone your skills?

My father is an architect, so I grew up steeped in his lessons about architectural movements and polyhedra. As a math major in college, I was fascinated by topology, which studies surfaces and transformations — and I see fashion in much the same way: a transformation of two-dimensional fabric into three-dimensional forms, but forms that interact with the wearer’s body and personal style, and at the same time reference fashion history. Or to put it in less-nerdy terms, I find it magical to be able to go from a flat piece of fabric and a flat paper pattern, to an empty garment on a hanger, to a dress absolutely coming to life when its owner puts it on and imbues it with her personality.

I studied industrial design at California College of the Arts in San Francisco; conceptual design at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands; and fashion design at FIT. I learned my patternmaking skills from Prof. Evan Blackman, the outstanding menswear department head there, and through internships at Jean Yu and Threeasfour, both designers I loved for their ingenious and endlessly creative patternmaking.

One of Inglis' amazing coats from her F/W 2012 collection.  Photographer: Dan Lecca

You continue to revisit designs, like your circle skirt, from previous seasons.  Is there a reason for this? I personally think that by doing so you are reinforcing the well-designed, thoughtful process behind your clothing – they are so well-made, and “beyond” fashion that they don’t seem to go out of style.

I find that the most stylish women are those who sharply define their personal look and keep it over time, perhaps evolving gradually to stay current, but not changing constantly with the trends. I see my collection in the same light: adding interest from season to season in the form of new colors, patterns, and fabrications, while always retaining its underlying character. And part of that consistency lies in creating signature pieces that carry over from season to season.

Another advantage of bringing designs back is that it allows me the chance to refine them a little each season, as well as to experiment with different fabrications over time. I’ve discovered that my architectural silhouettes tend to work quite well in rigid as well as soft, drapey fabrics, and I love to discover them anew each time I source new fabrics.

Backstage at Titania Inglis' F/W 2012 presentation.  Photographer: Aliya Naumoff

A look from Titania Inglis' F/W 2012 collection.  Photographer: Aliya Naumoff

We often talk about the state of the eco-fashion movement in NYC.  One minute we’re exhilarated about all the new things that are happening, and the next minute we bemoan the fact that it seems like such a small world, where everyone knows everyone and we’re all preaching to the same choir.  Do you think the fact that you are considered an “eco” designer actually helps or hinders you?  Do you ever feel marginalized or misunderstood due to having the “eco” tag attached to you?

To be honest, at this point, the word “eco” really makes me shudder. It’s been so overused that it’s come to represent a marketing gimmick rather than a serious philosophy of doing business, and I wish we could just retire it. I prefer to describe my work as thoughtful design, taking into consideration all the cradle-to-grave implications of each design decision, from the origins of the fabric I’m using to the future use and care of the garment. Ultimately, I believe that a beautifully designed and manufactured garment is the most sustainable thing to make: a piece striking enough to stand out in the here and now, yet classically proportioned and so well-made that its owner will want to wear it for a lifetime.

The most difficult challenge in designing sustainably is finding low-impact fabrics that are high quality and that fit with my clean, androgynous aesthetic. I’ve already traveled to London and Tokyo to source gorgeous organic fabrics, and scoured the New York garment district for dead stock options. And I’ve found some beautiful ones, but the more I search, the more I realize that the production process of the fabric is less important than beautiful craftsmanship and quality that will wear well over time. Taking the long view, production is only one part of the garment’s life cycle. If a fabric is made from organic wool, but pills and wears out almost instantly, then the fact that the farmer polluted less in raising the sheep is completely outweighed by the fact that the end product is quickly headed for the dumpster.

Another difficulty with sustainable design is people’s narrow interpretation of what that means. It’s not possible to design anything to be 100% perfectly sustainable; we all have to choose our battles. Some designers choose to use local production, others organic fabrics, others yet use zero-waste cutting techniques. I’ve had people question my use of leather; but as a lifelong meat eater, I’m happy that the skin from the animals we slaughter is used to make something beautiful. Leather exists mainly as a byproduct of the meat industry, and it’s a beautiful, supple, and long-lasting material that perfectly showcases my simple, architectural designs.

Set design for F/W 2012 presentation. Photographer: Georgina Southen

You've been collaborating quite a bit lately, with people like Bliss Lau and Christian Stroble, and organizations like the Textile Arts Center.  Do you have any other dream collaborators you'd like to work with?

Working with Bliss and Christian this season was an absolute dream; in addition to having very strong fashion visions, they’re both incredibly smart and resourceful and really mentored me through the whole process of organizing a show and creating a larger collection. I’d never worked with a stylist before and was a bit hesitant to let somebody else impose their vision on my work, but Christian’s input really helped take the collection to the next level.

One of my favorite parts of running this line is collaborating with performers in other creative fields. My first season I choreographed a video with three Merce Cunningham dancers, and for last fall’s video I worked with a trapeze artist. Next up, I’d love to collaborate with a musician: There are so many dynamic, inspiring women in rock these days, from Alison Mosshart to Lykke Li to the Dum Dum Girls, and it’d be amazing to see them wearing my clothes!

What is next in store for you?

After all the excitement of the award and last week’s show, I’m taking it easy and waiting to see how sales go before I decide what to do next. Of course, taking it easy is relative; I’m also getting ready for sales, ramping up spring production, and in the back of my mind, starting to plan out the Spring 2013 collection and how I’d like to present it. I already have a couple of favorite new fabrics squirreled away that I’m dying to see made up in some nice architectural shapes. And I’d love to do a shoe collaboration next season...

Photographer: Georgina Southen

A reflection on Absence: Thanos Kyriakides

by Francesca Granata 

Blind Adam, Photos by Yiorgos Mavropoulos

Thanos Kyriakides started Blind Adam in 2007, with the intent of exploring the more poetic and artistic qualities of fashion. His work consists, for the most part, of creating ghostly exoskeleton of garments. Rendered in black wool acrylic thread, his pieces are reminiscent of photographic negatives, thus reading as a meditation on absence and loss. They also speak to the forgotten craft of clothes-making, as they carefully follow the place where the seams would have been, thus reading as a reference to garment construction and pattern-making. Previously to his work with Blind Adam, Thanos worked predominantly as a stylist for magazine editorial, where the careful construction of a perfect vision is paramount. Thus, his current work, in its very quiet and tactile quality—the thread used to construct the ghostly garment refer to the Braille system for the blind—seems an obvious departure from such work.

I met Thanos while in Greece this summer to give a talk about the grotesque in contemporary fashion, in conjunction with Vassilis Zidanakis’s exhibition “Arghhh Monsters in Fashion” at the Benaki Museum in Athens. I was so intrigued by his work that I later checked in with the artist via e-mail….

You started Blind Adam in 2007. What prompted your transition from working in editorial and magazines to doing this more experimental work?

After 17 years in fashion, it was about time for me to find a way to express more esoteric feelings and go beyond the limits of fashion, in order to orient myself towards a more artistic direction.

Your work now has as much more to do with a tactile quality than it does with a visual one, as well as being very time consuming. Could you describe your process, and the way in which you construct your pieces?

Yes, that's true. The process has two stages: it starts by taking double acrylic wool thread, which is the material I always use, and making knots along its length. The result is something that is reminiscent of a chaplet or a "connect the dots" game. After having made miles of this, I pass onto the construction of a piece by assembling the hand-knotted threads.

If I understand your work correctly, you use wool thread to create an exoskeleton of a garment, as the thread follows the lines of where the garment’s seams would have been. In some ways, your work reads like the ghost of a garment, where all the cloth has left and only the silhouette of seams remains. As a result, your work suggests, at least to me, an absence—the absence of the body, but also of the cloth, which is meant to represent that body. Would you agree? This certain feeling of melancholia, past and memory is perhaps most obvious in your pieces that make references to historical pieces, such as the jacket with epaulettes.

Exactly! One could say that it is the bare of the bare minimum or a metaphor, but of course the structural form of the clothes is present in a ghostly way. This is especially true of the pieces that represent the garment’s skeletons. There is a strong reference to the "Emperor's New Clothes" tale.

I was also wondering why you chose such a limited palette (of black and white)? Again, perhaps I am projecting, but your pieces also remind me of shadows.

Yes indeed, a shadowy, ghostly effect was intended. Aside from that, black on white gives the desirable graphic contrast, reminding of a sketch with black pen on white paper, that becomes 3D.

I was wondering if you could speak about your recent string installations. Did you mean to create a map of the room? I know your work often has to do with measuring distance through the use of equidistant knot on the thread you use. Is the installation a continuation of this?

The installation is called "Incommunicado" and my intention was to create a symbolic tower of Babel. The piece was adjusted according to the room's dimensions as I intended for the installation to have a claustrophobic spider-web effect. What I forgot to mention earlier is that the knotted thread that I use, also refers to the Braille system for the blind so you could say that it represents a form of language. The meaning of this piece is that human conversation has a minimum point of contact and then spreads to undetermined directions until it meets again for a split second and so on, creating thus a communicating maze.

Finally, I was wondering if a shift from a medium that is more closely related to image/distance and vision, such as fashion photography, to one that involves tactility, making and a more intimate/close connection to the object, is something that came about as a result in your change in vision? And if so, how?

Yes, it certainly affected this transition but not in a compelling way. With this project I wanted to combine various influences, references, ideas, esoteric needs and of course to set questions on fundamental issues that have been always puzzling humanity.

Interview with Rebecca Burgess about her Vision for a Thriving Local Textile Economy

By Mae Colburn

Rebecca Burgess: What a Fibershed is, is taking responsibility for the biological context of your clothes. I’m interested in the revitalization of my community’s economy and green jobs, but I’m also interested in reconnecting to the plant and animal communities that are responsible for our clothes.  It’s quite a beautiful narrative, if we could support it.

It’s a beautiful narrative, and an imperative, according to Rebecca Burgess.  Burgess’ blog chronicles Fibershed-related events, projects, and the Fibershed Challenge: her quest to live for one year in clothes made from fibers sourced within a geographical region no larger than 150 miles from her front door. Her book, Harvesting Color, explains the dye potential of 36 plants, including pokeweed, elderberries, indigo, and coyote brush. Her restoration education curriculum gives children the opportunity to “investigate macro-environmental issues of our day” and “create solutions within their own landscape.”  Finally, the Fibershed Marketplace website, to be launched later this month, will provide resources for those interested in starting their own Fibershed Project.

Somehow, Burgess also finds time to work on her 45-acre organic farm in Northern California, where she grows and harvests over 4,500 natural dye plants.  She often does phone interviews from the farm: “I put my headset in, do my work, and answer calls.”  Burgess works hard, fueled both by sheer enthusiasm and by a distinct sense of urgency.  Her vision for a “thriving local textile economy” answers to a growing concern about the environmental, social, and economic impacts of the clothing industry.  Likewise, the Fibershed model serves as both a functional and symbolic antidote to the prevailing system.  Burgess’ commitment to local fiber reminds us of the physical labor involved in creating a garment from – as she puts it – “fiber to skin,” and forces us to reconsider the relationship between our bodies and our clothes.

RB: These little realities about living and working with plants and animals – it creates a difference in your body.  I know this because I observed the changes in myself.  You really learn how to work.  It’s like systems theory; you can get a system to start producing good results if you get the pendulum swinging in the right direction.  My body is different now; I’m sunburnt most of the time (even though I wear a lot of sunblock), but I’m strong, and I can endure long hours, and I have a much greater sense of confidence in what I can do physically because I see the product of my labor.

Tomorrow I’m driving up to the Capay Valley, where I have 2,000 indigo plants that I’m going to harvest.  I’m going to be harvesting from nine to nine at night, and I’ll have six or seven days like that in the summer.  Then once I harvest the indigo, I have to dry it all, stomp it, separate the stems, bag it, bring it back to the facility that I’m renting.  This summer has been a lot of maintenance; I have to do a lot of gopher trapping at the farm.  I’ve been dealing with irrigation problems, pressure valves, dripping stuff that’s not dripping the right way.  I’m getting tired, but I’m building capacity.

MC: Do you see this as a creative outlet as well as a manual, physical experience?

RB: Creativity is definitely expressed through the body, and I get to use my whole body while I’m farming.  I’m lifting.  I’m carrying.  I’m dragging.  I’m walking around.  I’m bending up and down.  All of that is a form of self-expression because you’re making all these small decisions for yourself.  You’re applying your own ideas and concepts second-to-second.  It sounds like mundane stuff, but oddly enough for the modern person, this is new terrain – at least for me – to have a total flow out on a land base, being out on 45 acres of organic farm, working.

MC: Do you see yourself as part of a movement of people interested in local textiles?

RB: I see myself as part of a continuum, a historical continuum, around textiles in this area.  In my region, a lot of retirees started raising sheep and alpaca, but not a lot of people were raising fiber for money.  When ‘fibershed’ became a useful word for people, and the community at large, some of those who’d been doing it a long time started to become recognized in a new way, and to feel the power behind what they were doing.

MC: On your website, you state that your mission is to “go beyond the one-year wardrobe and create a thriving local textile economy.”  What do you see this thriving local economy looking like?

RB: A thriving local textile economy would include current and existent land-owners working with young people, putting second housing on their land – for example, green modular trailers with solar panels.  If farmworker housing were a top priority, we could start training people who don’t yet have the skills, but have the energy [to begin farming].  The really important thing is continuity, and the only way to cultivate continuity is to put young people in proximity to people who have the skills.

But on a macro level, from a very specific supply chain perspective, we need to be able to take our wool, alpaca, mohair, then cotton, and eventually bast fibers (linen, hemp), and mill them at small-scale milling facilities that can be run off of solar technology.  There hasn’t been farm-based milling equipment designed for fibers except for wool, and there’s very little farm-based milling equipment for wool even, but for cotton it’s almost nonexistent, and for bast fibers – I have to put a call out there to anyone who understands how to engineer bast-fiber processing equipment and can scale it down to a farm size.

Pre-industrial revolution, we were relying on massive manpower, indentured servants, slaves.  Now we’re in a new era.  If we go back to a human-powered economy, this can’t be about indentured servants and slaves.  It has to be about cooperatively owned businesses, about people working for the common good – that’s how we’re going to inspire people to get involved in this.  We need equipment that honors our humanity; we’re not going to be slaves to technology, but we’re also not going to be slaves to each other.  We need this new human-scale technology combined with continuity of the generations.  We already have world-class fibers.  We have no lack of fiber, but there’s no processing equipment in my region, so all of those pieces – how to get the wool off the sheep, how to wash it, how to card it, how to blend it, spin it – all of this needs serious improvement.  To me, it’s about enhancing human infrastructure, technological infrastructure, and communication.  We’re talking about a revitalization of the whole economy when we talk about the revitalization of a Fibershed.

MC: Do you have any recommendations for people interested in learning more or starting a similar project?

RB: The website that we’re going to launch in the next week and a half will have a reading list and the protocol that we followed.  We started a one-year challenge, so we had a prototype wardrobe.  I started a Kickstarter campaign.  How did I organize farmers and artisans?  I used Google Docs.  I used Doodle Calendar.  I did community-building projects where instead of charging for workshops, I gave free classes for artisans and farmers, to bring them together.  You need to be able to build a network.  You also have to be in good health, because it takes a sound mind and body to create these networks and keep them alive.  It’s kind of like running a marathon in the beginning.

Mae Colburn is an independent textile researcher and writer and professional seamstress based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rebecca Burgess is an ecological restoration educator, curricula developer, author, and textile artist and a fifth-generation resident of the watershed where she works in Northern California.

A Conversation with Harold Koda about Fashion and Art

by Ingrid Mida

Harold Koda by Karin Willis (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Harold Koda has served as the Curator-in-Charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2000 and is the author of 19 books. He agreed to an interview on the subject of art and fashion with Ingrid Mida and this is a transcript of their conversation on September 16, 2011.  Harold will be speaking tomorrow, November 8, 2011 for the Bata Shoe Museum Founder's Lecture on the topic of Fashion and the Art Museum.

Ingrid:  Do you have an opinion on where the boundary sits between fashion and contemporary art?

Harold: Until the last quarter of the 20th century, there was a clear boundary between fashion and the “fine” arts.  With few exceptions fashion designers rarely saw themselves in the role of the artist.  They aligned themselves more closely with creators in the applied arts, and associated their work with craft and artisanal traditions.

There were exceptions.  The most notable was Paul Poiret who felt all the skills required to create an exceptional dress were those of a painter, sculptor, and musician.  Even as his collections fell out of fashionability in the 1920s, critics conceded that his distinction resided in his artistic approach to design.  The American mid-century designer, Charles James, who won a Guggenheim Fellowship, always promoted his work as equal to the other arts.  Certainly, designers from Charles Frederick Worth, whose personal style projected a Rembrant-esque bohemianism, onward have seen the advantage that a “high art” association might have on their design house.  This is especially notable in collaborations between fashion houses and contemporary artists (Poiret/Dufy, Schiaparelli/Dali, Tracey Emin/Longchamp, Louis Vuitton/Takashi Murakami, Miyake/Cai Guo-Qiang).

As early as Duchamp and post-Warhol, the traditional parameters of what constitutes an artwork had begun to erode or, rather, expand.  This benefited fashion.  The further blurring of the boundaries between art and fashion has occurred relatively recently.  When contemporary artists as diverse in their practice as Cindy Sherman, Judith Shea, Joseph Beuys, Barbara Kruger, Jim Dine, and Richard Prince, all cite concepts and imagery related to apparel and the fashion system, fashion began to be seen as a subject for serious intellectual consideration.  Designers, especially those that presented works on the runway intended to convey compelling ideas and themes, rather than more quotidian commercial works, began to be seen in the wider context of art production.

Ingrid: How do you feel about Matthew Teitelbaum’s suggestion that a fashion designer has to have a specific intent to engage in the artistic community in order to be considered an artist?

Harold: I like to point out, just as not all photographs are art, not all fashion is art, but what constitutes an important work in either field is not necessarily established by the intention of its creator or the reason for its creation.

While having fashion designers state explicitly that their work is informed by, or engages directly in the issues and practices of the arts community makes it easier to isolate their works from the general field of more commercial work, intentionality is not a sole prerequisite to the consideration of an individual designer as an artist.

Two of the greatest artists in 20th century fashion were Madeleine Vionnet and Cristobal Balenciaga.  Neither had the hubris to say they created art:  Vionnet always described herself as a simple “dressmaker.”  However, anyone with knowledge of the métier of the haute couture would acknowledge that Vionnet’s technical virtuosity--she was the great innovator of the use of the bias cut--and aesthetic elegance, and Balenciaga’s investigation of the codified traditions of tailoring resulting in sculpted forms of unprecedented refinement made them artists.  All their clothes were meant to be worn and none were created purely for art-for-art’s-sake, but even deprived of a cultural, political, economic, and gender narrative, their designs transcend the pragmatics and function of dress to achieve something grander akin to other artistic masterworks.

Ingrid: Nathalie Bondil of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art said that she didn’t care that Jean Paul Gaultier said that "fashion is not art". She thought it important to convey his premise that beauty has no singular shape, age, size, or sexual orientation. This message is presented very subtly within the context of the exhibition and probably lost to the average viewer. Do you feel it is important for a designer to convey a social, political or conceptual premise over the course of their career to merit presentation within the confines of a museum?

Harold: Not necessarily.  For example, we don’t generally insist on such criteria for a painting on a Japanese sliding door, the carvings on a New Guinea spear, or the casting of a Shang bronze vessel, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that designers who freight their creations with narratives beyond their simple utility and formal qualities of dress are not more easily rationalized as artists.  We prize the work of designers like Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, and John Galliano, not for the manifestations of their work put into production, but for their most difficult, conceptually-driven, often commercially untenable, creations.  On the other hand, a designer like Azzedine Alaia seems actively to avoid any larger allusion to his work other than to create beautiful clothes.  Still, the originality of his designs and the technical mastery they reveal would have anyone who knows this field concede that he is an artist.

Ingrid: Do you think curators play a significant role in defining a fashion designer’s work as an artist? In other words, the curator can make choices to animate a display of costume with light, sound, and/or video, group displays thematically instead of chronologically, and select mannequins to enhance the presentation as an art installation. Do you think it is possible to turn any designers work into an art installation?

Harold: Curators may play a role in establishing certain designers as exemplary and as artists.  To function successfully as a curator requires a knowledgeable specialization in a subject area with a level of expertise and the discrimination associated with that.  But it is in the isolation of an individual design or selected works from a designer--that is by editing--that a curator argues for an evaluation of the artistic achievement of that designer.

To attempt to establish the value of a body of work simply through installation techniques would be a kind of subterfuge.   It might be possible, but in the end it is about the importance of the object.  Most curators do not see themselves as installation artists in which the work of others is reduced to a component of their new artistic vision or creation.

Perhaps this will seem a subjective approach, but there are instances where as a curator one sees a design as something conceptually or culturally richer in meaning than the creator of the piece intended.  Sometimes a design can be imbued with much more aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional resonance than its creator ever imagined.  To place such an object in the context of a museum with the cultural imprimatur it suggests seems legitimate.

Ingrid: Fashion is far more accessible to the average person than contemporary art is. Do you feel that this is a driver behind the increasing popularity of fashion exhibitions in the museum world?

Harold: It has always been my observation that no matter how familiar an audience is with the work of a painter of sculptor, their reaction in the galleries is a hushed reverence, where their responses and comments are whispered.  In our costume galleries, comments are more freely articulated in a conversational tone.  The reason for this might be that with clothing, even if it is the apparel of the French 18th century court or an item of haute couture beyond the reach of most of the population, people feel the right to their opinions based on their own direct knowledge of what it means to get dressed every morning.  At the Museum, The Costume Institute galleries are in the far north end on the ground floor.  They are difficult to find.  Philippe de Montebello used to say when he was Director here, “The Costume Institute is a point of destination.”  He was acknowledging that our audiences had to search us out.  That our attendance numbers are among the highest in the institution suggests the popularity of the collection.

However, furniture is as much a part of our lives as clothing, but exhibitions on furniture and furniture makers do not draw as much interest as costume exhibitions.  Perhaps it is less about accessibility than the fact that clothing is able to represent a myriad of issues that have a direct relevance to each of us and the identities we construct and convey.  So, more than accessible, I’d say the operative word is relevant.

Ingrid Mida is a Toronto-based artist and writer who recently gave the keynote address at the Costume Society of America mid-west conference on the subject of Fashion and Art.

A Conversation with Valerie Steele about Fashion and Art

by Ingrid Mida

Valerie Steele by Aaron Cobbett

Dr. Valerie Steele is the Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Fashion Theory. She spoke with Ingrid Mida on the topic of fashion and art on August 23, 2011. This is the transcript of their telephone conversation.

Ingrid: In July, I interviewed Matthew Teitelbaum who is the director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario and in my conversation with him, he suggested that for a fashion designer to be considered an artist, he thought it was important for them to have the specific intention to engage in the artistic community before they could be considered as art. And I wondered what your reaction might be to that?

Valerie: I think that is a valid objection, because art is not just the object itself, be it the painting or the dress, it is also the belief in the value that it is art which is created by quite a number of different people collectively, including the creators themselves. Whenever I’ve questioned whether or not fashion is art, some people have gotten annoyed and said “how can you of all people question whether fashion is art?” But I have to question it, because designers as varied as Karl Lagerfeld, Rei Kawakubo, and Miuccia Prada have all denied that what they do is art. Part of the issue is who controls the definition of art? And does the creator’s intention trump all other interpretations of the work.

Let me step back for a minute.  Certain kinds of art, like classical music and old master paintings, achieve 100% buy-in; everyone agrees that this is art. Other kinds of creative endeavors -- like cinema, photography, and jazz -- were formerly not regarded as art, but increasingly over the past 30 or so years have been accepted as art, so that you have a photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, jazz is regarded as a great American art form, etcetera. I would say that fashion is one of those categories which is in the process of being reevaluated as art, but that process is still very much contested.  The person who is most useful to me in thinking about this was Bourdieu, who has written about the construction of art, and about how you have to have a group of people (dealers, curators, museum directors and collectors) who agree that something is art, and you also have to have some kind of consensus that the creator is an artist.

For example, some designers such as Hussein Chalayan have suggested that they may be artists, because “we studied at Central Saint Martins, where fashion is regarded as one of the arts, maybe a kind of body art. It’s true that we had to look at the business angle because we had to sell it, but we also received training as artists.” Most fashion designers , however, do not receive that type of training; they are trained to be fashion designers. Most of them regard themselves as fashion designers, not as artists.

Ingrid: That is an interesting perspective but there is so much overlap between the two especially if you consider the way that the Met presented McQueen’s work as an artist and the thematic premise of the show was that McQueen was a Romantic individualist, a “hero-artist who staunchly followed the dictates of his inspiration.”. The intent seems to be to present his work as an artist and that fashion was his medium.

Valerie: Yes you could argue that, and because the Met is an art museum, that is an implicit message behind all of their exhibitions of fashion.  You cannot look at the McQueen show in isolation. The Met had the Chanel show with Lagerfeld and many other designer exhibitions.  Do you say that everything at the Costume Institute is art because it is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? The McQueen show was  brilliant, in part because McQueen was the greatest fashion designer of our era.  In addition, Andrew curated the exhibition brilliantly and was working with McQueen’s collaborators to create the ambiance that existed within his fashion shows, which many regarded as a type of performance art or theatrical art.

There is no consensus yet that fashion is art. However, by showing fashion in museums, it has encouraged the idea that fashion is art. It is true that if you look at a McQueen or a Balenciaga in the context of an art museum, it has the aura of a work of art, but it doesn’t mean it was created to be art.

Ingrid: That leads me to the next question referencing the Jean Paul Gaultier show. When I interviewed Nathalie Bondil, Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, she said she didn’t really care that Jean Paul Gaultier had expressed the opinion that fashion is not art. She was more interested in the underlying premise of his work that beauty has no singular shape, age, gender or sexual orientation and that this was the important message to convey.

Valerie: That is an important message to convey, but not one that has to do anything with art. Art is not defined by the pursuit of beauty and has not been so for at least 100 years.

Ingrid: Most artists have a premise that underpins their work so if there is a socio-political message by which to reference their work, I think that is relevant. The JPG show used the animated mannequins and other means to convey an art installation like presentation. Since you are a curator yourself, do you think that a curator can make fashion into art by the way it is installed or by incorporating lights, sound, video?

Valerie: Not singlehandedly, no. A curator is one of the participants in the art world who can help promote the idea that fashion can be interpreted as art, but it is not really up to one individual curator any more than it is up to one individual designer to make a flat out decision as to whether fashion is or is not art. That has to be a collective decision. So no matter how much we admire a particular designer or regard the work as being as visually and intellectually gripping as a painting or a sculpture, it is not something that we can individually decide -- that it is art or is not art.

Regarding the animated mannequins in the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition, I think that the faces, while fascinating, conveyed Gaultier’s belief that fashion is part of life, not that fashion is an art form. There is a real split between designers, like Paul Poiret and Elsa Schiaparelli, who thought that fashion is art, and those like Chanel and Gaultier, who say that it is part of life.  You also have certain artists who have tried to transform the material of life into art.  And you have certain critics who believe that fashion is  art’s evil “Other.”

Ingrid Mida is a Toronto-based artist. writer and researcher who recently gave the keynote address at the Costume Society of America mid-west conference.