Art and fashion have their wonderful ways to step in to say in a very crisp manner what the words are too shallow and too vague to utter. And even what I find astonishing is how different forms of art can translate and communicate shared feelings and sentiments in a strikingly similar fashion.
“Artfully” distracted and fragmented
Let me get a bit specific. Before moving to Italy (when fashion was not really my area of interest), I was in Argentina mostly studying psychoanalysis and interested in many ways that art could communicate the most ineffable notions of our psyche. After moving to Italy, fashion became another fascination of mine in a way how it can be the mirror to the cold reality of our times and wishful hopes of our hearts. Since I moved to Italy three years ago, I can’t really differentiate between art and fashion. Not that I see the all pieces of garment as a piece of art. Yet I believe, each final product somehow says so much about the designer. Not about what the designer wanted to communicate, but what was really her/his state of mind, what she/he was living through or what was running thru her/his mind during the process.
Sometimes, the similarities I see in ways art and fashion communicate shared human sentiments are striking. One of such similarities I’d like to talk about is between the art installations of Marta Minujin, an acclaimed Argentine artist and John Galliano, well-respected designer of Maison Margiela.
Little background information for those who do not know Marta Minujin. This flamboyant artist hails from Argentina and is the queen of pop art, performance art, “happenings” etc. She was a friend of Andy Warhol. I loved her free, deconstructive, mind provoking installations. Back in 2010, she explained her fractured monuments and statues as follows – we are so distracted, bombarded with lots of information in every given second, it is hard to pull ourselves together. This theme manifests our confused, defragmented state of mind, all over, never concentrated.
“Fashionably” decayed
As we lived along the collective concussion caused by the digital disruption more-less the same concept translated into the Couture pieces of John Galliano in his 2018 collection presented in Paris with strikingly similar designs – fragmented, layered, kind of all-over the place, nomad minds.
A year passed. Came along another Couture week. Maison Margiela presented an outstanding presentation of “walking art pieces” translating decay, artifice, excess. Almost the same concept of some other installations by Marta Minujin – which I see as an expression of our current badly-functioning memory unable to forget (ditch), clean, organize and systematize. State of serious confusion.
Now I am looking at photos and still can’t get over how sharp the language of art and fashion could be in transmitting a message that the words are powerless to describe. Above all, how some shared sentiments can translate into strikingly similar visual messages by different forms of art.
