Cecilia Dean, founder and editor of V magazine, writer David Colman and Klaus Biesenbach of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) came together to curate “MOVE!,” a two-day Halloween weekend of art and fashion. The event was held in the New York MoMA’s PS1, the museum’s designated space for live art. Each artist was matched with a designer charged to produce anything they could dream up together.
“The point was to do something action-based and dynamic,” Dean said in an interview. “We didn’t want to hang things on a wall or put dresses on a mannequin.”
All the collaborations were between artists of the varied disciplines: visual, performance, dance and theater artists paired up with New York-based fashion designers. Some notable collaborators were Kalup Linzy and Diane von Furstenberg, Rob Pruitt and Marc Jacobs, Olaf Breuning and Cynthia Rowley, Brody Condon and Rodarte, Rashaad Newsome and Alexander Wang, and Dan Colen and Proenza Schouler.
As much as I find the intersection between art and fashion fascinating and important to explore, many of the collaborations seemed unbalanced. Most of the partnerships picked one or the other, namely art. The clothing became a costume for the performance piece, which should not be confused with fashion.
In the case of Alexander Wang and Rashaad Newsome, 18 women performed in an orchestra made up of snaps and breaths. The fact that they were clothed was about as involved as Alexander Wang got to be. Similarly, the Mulleavy sisters (Rodarte), with all of their design talent, put white sacks over performers moving in space with big metal rods. Diane von Furstenberg, creator of the wrap dress, gave a sparkly one to Linzy, the performance artist known for acting out soap operas in drag.
Injustice aside, this hierarchy of art was just absurd. The format of this exhibit put the artists in a weird position of separating out fashion as just the garment and the art part as the performance, which places the artistic innovation on the movement itself, rendering the clothes irrelevant.
Some of the more interesting pieces managed to stray from the costumed performance route with varying degrees of success. Cynthia Rowley and Olaf Breuning took their assignment perfectly literally, pouring paint onto garment: art + fashion! Rowley designed over 40 pieces to be worn and covered in paint, which was doused onto each subject by Breuning himself, perched atop a ladder. While not exactly groundbreaking, the piece was deliberate in paring both disciplines down to paint and dress and showed the process in an interactive way.
Similarly, Rob Pruitt and Marc Jacobs created a green-screen catwalk for museum-goers to strut down, which was then manipulated to look as if their walk was part of a real fashion show. Jacobs, champion of self-aware kitsch, effectively explored the culture of fashion through the lens of Pruitt’s art technology.
Moving outside of the studio, Dan Colen and Proenza Schouler placed garments throughout New York City embedded with video cameras, which live-streamed its feed into the MoMA space, documenting the life of the piece for two days. Here fashion, as it exists in the world, was transported back into viewable art, making the most intellectual statement on the relationship between art and fashion, instead of oversimplifying and attempting to differentiate the two.
My main issue with the exhibit as a whole was its insistence on the difference between art and fashion. As if saying here, at the MoMA for two nights only: art and fashion are together now for the first time. Fashion is art, is influenced by art, is informed by art and is surrounded by art. Fashion shows are their own singular performance art pieces. Art is present in the craft of the garment and in the design of the presentation.
Throughout the history of fashion, designers have been taking inspiration from art and interacting with artists of all disciplines in creating their own collections. This is not a new, isolated or forced instance; it is as it has always been. The exhibit called itself dynamic, interactive, art plus fashion, but that isn’t just paint on a dress, it is fashion itself out in the world. Art in fashion is real, it lives, it moves: me, you, we are the art object.