Arts & Culture Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 27) Written by Kevin Costello : : Ilustrations by Amy Rideout Shifts in Time The relationship Between Art and Haute-Couture hen a svelte fashion model insouciantly struts her stuff down the catwalk to the flash of cameras and the beat of music, the history of fashion and art walk hand in glove beside her, in a symbiotic relationship that demonstrates a simple truth. Designer clothing is the most common form of abstract art, and in many ways one of the world’s oldest. It expresses the personality of the designer, and by extension the wearer, through pure color, shape and texture, to the same degree that painting and sculpture express the personality of the artist. By way of example, fashion history can point to the enduring fascination that artists and designers have for the line and sensuality of GrecoRoman costume, a style reprised many times over the centuries. Two paintings in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., serve to illustrate this point: the charming Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, painted in 1783 by Thomas Gainsborough, and the sensual Portrait of a Young Woman in White, c. 1805, by a painter in the circle of Jacques-Louis David. In Gainsborough’s Baroque masterpiece, the loose-fitting dress worn by the Duchess echoes the Doric peplos—an outer robe or over skirt worn by women in ancient Greece. In the Neo-Classical portrait of the young woman, her chemise, a high-waisted sheath with a wide, low décolleté and scant sleeves, expresses in its skimpiness a wild dream of femininity during the troubled times of the Directory and rise to power of Napoleon. Draped evening gowns by Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Angel Estrada for the spring-summer collections of 1989 reference, in the first instance, the votive statuettes of Tanagra, Greece in the third century BCE; and in the second, the sculptures of goddesses that once adorned the Acropolis in Athens. Both take their inspiration from the simple fact that a combination of tight and loose tailoring in breezy materials such as linen, cotton, muslin or tulle gives a woman a soft, statuesque silhouette at once imperious and erotic. But where did modern fashion begin? Haute couture, the art of designing exclusive, fashionable clothes for women, is an outgrowth of mercantilism in the second half of the fourteenth century. It is hardly a coincidence that this period, under the influence of the followers of the Italian master Giotto, saw the beginning of the individualization of w www.artsandculturemag.com http://www.artsandculturemag.com
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