How art has influenced fashion - Essay Example

Artists have actively participated in providing pattern and color concepts for textiles, thus physically influencing fashion through directly active design. As well, the links between consumerism, the media, and art has provided rich resources for editorial fashion. The links between art and fashion have become a symbiotic relationship in which each aspect is influential on the other. Art and fashion have had a relationship since the time of the Renaissance when renowned artists such as Bellini, Pollaiuolo, and Pisanello became actively involved in design through painting fashions, creating textiles, and designing embroidery.

Pisanello, an artist for the Italian courts, was responsible for painting portraits of the aristocracy that portrayed them in the latest armor and fashions in order to suggest modernity. Princes could be portrayed as militarily significant in strategic warfare and from the perspective of current and innovative fashion, social status was represented (Mackrell 5). Through imagery, people of status could allow the public to create an impression of power, competence, social class, intelligence, and beauty as seen through the artists eye, which included the design of the garments that were portrayed.

Fashion has been a tool for providing a context for modernity since that time, those of status and power denoting the course of that status and power through visual cues from the editorial of fashion. According to Polhemus and Proctor, the differences between fashion and anti-fashion exist within the modern, and the fixed and unmoving. The example that they use is the coronation gown of Queen Elizabeth II from 1953 in comparison to the Dior ’tulip line’ dress from the same year. The gown of the queen was painfully traditional, suggesting continuance and the stability of the status quo.

It is anti-fashion as it shows no relevancy to change or growth. Fashion, on the other hand, represents discontinuity and the elusive reach for modernity, always stretching towards the next season of growth, both a symbol of the present and of the change of seasons. Had Queen Elizabeth worn the tulip gown, she would have been telling her people that a new era had begun, rather than assuring them that the old era was still in place. Fashion is about communication just as the medium of art is about communication.

What the elite wear communicates their social position in the greater context. In continuing with the fashion story of the British Monarchy, Princess Diana, despite her many flaws, used fashion as a way to communicate her own position on the meaning of her role in the monarchy. Her connection with modern fashion communicated to the public that she was well aware of life from a modern point of view. While her charity and public service provided further context for her representational position, her relationship to modern, tasteful, and sometimes daring fashion allowed her to state that she recognized the current state of the world and believed in the importance of her role for change.

Barnard states that “her image (was) of an upwardly mobile, modern, non-traditional young woman with an interest in changing and improving things, through her charity and humanitarian work” (19). Because of its role as an elite form of clothing, fashion, as defined as being symbolic of change and growth within society, is directly associated with the elite of a culture. Defining fashion is under the prerogative of