Book Review: Legendary Artists and the Clothes They Wore
Terry Newman, Legendary Artists and the Clothes They Wore, Harper Design, $19.99, 206 pp., May 2019
Legendary Artists and the Clothes They Wore is a compelling contribution to the “Is Fashion Art?” debate. The author, Terry Newman, a fashion journalist and lecturer, sees “the clothes artists wear and the work they create as parts of a single equation.” The book profiles over forty 20th and 21st century artists, from Pablo Picasso to Yayoi Kusama, and considers the clothes artists wore and their intersections with fashion. It is full of captivating quotes, and full-page color images of artists who marked out their individual styles.
Newman’s position that an artist’s self-fashioning mirrors their creative expression lends itself better to some artists than others. For instance, her discussion of David Hockney’s playful and colourful clothing is illustrative of his bold and colourful style seen in works such as A Bigger Splash (1967) or The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, 2011 (twenty eleven). Similarly, Frida Kahlo’s traditional Mexican dresses played a major role in the iconic image of the artist in her self-portraits, and reflected the themes of identity and heritage in her work. The book is primarily anecdotal, however, and offers sartorial details, such as that Keith Haring only wore high-top sneakers and Julian Schnabel has a penchant for pajamas.
Newman delves further into the collisions between the art and fashion worlds, which can be a strong legitimating factor for fashion brands. Each brief encounter with an artist shows how they have collaborated with fashion or have inspired fashion designers. While many of these collaborations are now iconic, for instance Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress, others have gained considerably less scholarly attention.
Bruce Nauman, photographed by Francois le Diascorn
The strength of this book is its inclusion of recent attempts to reconsider the place fashion has within the art world, and vice versa. The section devoted to Robert Mapplethorpe is a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Newman calls attention to the influence of Mapplethorpe’s personal style and art at Raf Simons’ Spring 2017 Menswear runway show. The models bore a striking resemblance to the artist and wore shirts with his images on them, exemplifying how an artist’s persona and their work are translated into fashion in the 21st century.
This beautifully designed book will spark an interest in how many artists connect to fashion and blur the lines between restricted and large-scale production. It is a good introduction to the debate of “Is Fashion Art?” and in this case, all signs point to yes.
