Fashionable Figures

Marley Marius investigates the rich history of artists working with clothes in their lives and, more urgently, in their work.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who loved clothes-she owned some 100 dresses, by her caretaker's estimate, "all alike, except that some are black instead of white"-once likened painting to "a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life." It's an elegant quote, though nearly as tricky to interpret as O'Keeffe's heady florals and sweeping desertscapes. Was she positing art as the sinew of...ideas? As an undergirding for the stuff of life?

Or did she have a different kind of thread work in mind? O'Keeffe owned several pairs of low suede heels from Saks Fifth Avenue, rigorously simple but for the raised seams running down their centers and branching off the sides like the boughs of a tree. If art can do that to the fabric of existence transform the banal (and bourgeois) into the beguiling-then what can clothes do to art? While her fondness for dresses (and for skirt suits and jeans and chambray shirts) didn't quite show up on O'Keeffe's canvases, a taste for dreamy, creamy pastels certainly did.

Where other painters may lack O'Keeffe's abundant wardrobe, they can afford to have more fun with fashion in their work. (See "When Art Met Fashion," on page 156, for some notable recent examples.) This is especially true of portraitists. As the overlapping tides of Abstract Expressionism, minimalism, and conceptual art receded with the turn of the 21st century, a new generation of figurative artists emerged, keen to reimagine the form. About 100 years after John Singer Sargent became the most important portrait painter of his generation, capturing captains of industry (and their wives and daughters) across the northeast and Europe, Kerry James Marshall, Peter Doig, and others leveled their gazes on the triumphs and trials of more ordinary people and in doing so, gave clothing, once the marker of a sitter's social status, more to say.