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Dal ballo al museo: come l’abito diventa opera d’arte

My interest in the relationship between art and fashion goes back to an article entitled “Fashion as Art; is Fashion Art?” first published in Fashion Theory (The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture), volume 11, Issue 1, March 2007, pp.25-40. In it I debate whether fashion can be regarded as a form of art and if so, what kinds of things within fashion can legitimately be so regarded.

The first section of “Dal ballo al museo: come l’abito diventa opera d’arte”, some of the most recent contributions in dealing with this issue are critically analyzed. The conclusion that emerges is that, like art, clothes can provide the subject of historical research. The second section deals with the aesthetics of clothes. If sartorial fashion can be a form of art then we need an aesthetics of fashion. Whilst it would be difficult to contest the artistic quality of clothes throughout the centuries, fashion, like architecture, fulfils primarily a functional dimension. Some of the key concepts pertaining to classical aesthetics such as taste in the writings of Edmund Burke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Immanuel Kant with special reference to Kant’s less well-known writings on anthropology under which he classified fashion are discussed. Some of the more recent contributions such as Curt J. Ducase’s 1944 essay ‘The Art of Personal Beauty’ are also discussed in this section. Finally, Karen Hanson in her article ‘Dressing Up, Dressing Down: The Philosophic Fear of Fashion’ addresses this important issue, arguing that perhaps like dance, fashion has systematically been disregarded by philosophers as a worthy subject of research.

Like so many articles in Fashion Theory, this article is an attempt to redress this balance by seeking new ways of providing a serious theoretical and aesthetic basis for the study of sartorial fashion.

The premise of this book is that of fashion regarded as a form of art whereby fashion designers behave like avant-garde artists, major European and American art museums organise ‘retrospective’ exhibitions for them and they are generally treated in a manner hitherto reserved for painters and sculptors.

Through the contribution of sociologists, art historians, anthropologists and fashion studies specialists, this book explores the interstices between fashion and art and by transcending the question: ‘Is fashion art?’ it seeks to explore the causal links between them by redefining their new identities.