Runway Artifex

When art imitates life and fashion embraces art, a strange but sometimes magnificent fusion is born. We take a close look at our favourite times fashion became a blank canvas for artistic magic to unfold.

- Eleni Papaioannou

Probably the most re-posted look from the 2017 fashion week in Paris was at the Maison Margiela Artisanal show, where an all white trench coat by John Galliano was adorned by a ghostly portrait made of tulle, by multi-disciplinary artist Benjamin Shine. The dark mesh material that continues to wrap the model’s silhouette, even beyond the limits of the garment, creates a sculpture that apparently took more than 300 hours to make. Priceless. Who can put a price on art, you might say, especially when it turns into an everyday piece you can actually live in. The collaboration between the artist, who seems to be very hot at the moment, and Galliano, the once bad boy that has withdrawn to his work, avoiding public attention, after his drunk rant in 2011 cost him his job at Dior, has brought back to the spotlight one of the favorite themes of fashion writers: The fusion between art and fashion.

Looking back, one must start by paying tribute to Elsa Schiaparelli, the woman who lived in both worlds, creating dresses that were sometimes un-wearable, due to their strong artistic vision. However, there was a moment when she moved beyond her inspiration, the artist Salvador Dalí allowed one of her dresses to become the canvas for his art. The Lobster Dress they co-created in 1937 is a simple, white dress with a giant lobster, painted by Dalí, as homage to his 1934 creation “New York Dream-Man Finds Lobster in Place of Phone.”