Those who have been watching what happens in fashion have seen a more-than-usual association with art these past few seasons. Fashion has its creative aspect hand-in-hand with art because the creative aspects come from similar approaches. The artist takes inspiration from their environment and translates it into their medium of choice to communicate their observations and impressions to inspire emotional connection and reaction.
From time to time, fashion needs art when other avenues run their course, and art has no shortage of inspiration to offer. The textures, colour combinations, shapes and forms provide variety to satisfy the creative minds who create the collections. Some designers have the artists’ mind within, and understand the lexicon of the artist, finding harmony in the syncopated observations that become a collective “aha” within the more advanced creatives. They not only are inspired, they get what the artists see because they see it too.
Sometimes, art is inspired by what fashion conveys as fashion has access to the more pervasive influences that we label as trends. All trends are is the creative translation of interpretation of current and anticipated events expressed in materials much in the way that an artist does, albeit with more commercial applications in mind.
The excitement of youth echoing what happened in the 60s would find a reflection of pop culture and bold expression that hallmarked the original spirit. The rule-breaking exuberance and modernistic simplicity that accompanied the 20s would be revived as the same spirit returns today. As both art and fashion would catch wind of these similarities in mood, they would both reflect this while incorporating new twists that reflect current times.
One artist in particular has a connection with trending as he rose to fame providing an in-depth assessment of a generation and continuing to do so with others today. Douglas Coupland, known for giving the name “Generation X” to disaffected post-Boomers is a rare breed. Educated in at school yet having a trend forecaster’s eye for detail, he recently unveiled an art exhibition in the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada that is very telling not only about our world but also, if you are willing to look, about what fashion sees and incorporates (some images of his art can be seen in the "Photos" section in the companion Twitter feed @FashionObserved if you are curious).
Some of the art takes cues for the art movements of the 20s such as Dadaist collage approaches with pop icons. Other works involve arts and crafts incarnations reminding of folk art of the 70s .Pop approaches merge our tech with the more geometric aesthetic with undertones of social conscience or appropriation of our tech world made into pop art. Colour and geometry in form borrow from childhood elements that connect old-school materials with tech inspired mindsets. Some paintings utilize algorithms to find new ways to execute a Mondrian-like reduction of elements produced by original Canadian artists in the 20s. Other sculptural found art assemblies bring the cacophony of the kind of modern landscape urban environments provide; some lean to the anti-naturalistic Japanese experience or others the cookie-cutter conformity of suburbia while others are piles of assembly of domestic and found items that trigger personal childhood associations.
The pieces are thoughtful and well-executed and, above all reflect aspects of elemental execution found in 2015 Resort collections. Our geometric obsessions and cuts find similar hybrid approaches; technology influencing modern materials creation is blended with cuts from the 20s, 60s, 70s and 90s. And the 90s, if you recall, was a 70s reboot for the bulk of the decade with latter inspiration for the Belle Epoch, the 30s & the 40s, similar to what we have today. And of course this blog has before and will continue to illuminate these “coincidences”.
That an accomplished artist with a successful background in trend observation can produce items with similar roots is not a coincidence, but a terrific example of how our access to information has generated a collective understanding of interpretation that we can identify with. Artists, like creative designers who have more latitude, lead the way to letting us know what we see and feel. As they do, we embrace them, not realizing they are merely holding a mirror of our psyche in new forms to get us talking about what is around us and before us.
To have us buy, we need to connect. Sometimes it takes the emotional invocation that art brings to get us to do that. Given the economic uncertainties we are aware of, art is going to be part of our fashion conversation for a while. Or at least for as long as our attention spans allow. Such is the demands of fashion, reflected in us the consumer.