Today’s newsletter is dedicated to my favorite crossover: art x fashion. We’re looking at three unexpected collaborations with fine artists and fashion brands - from Dalí, Mondrian, and Warhol. Plus: guest picks by my favorite names in fashion + stay tuned for everything I’m loving right now.
For 10+ hours of the day, I’m not just thinking about art, I’m thinking about clothes. It is my job after all! I run brand at Alex Mill - where art x fashion intersects even more than you’d realize.
Last year, our designers went to the Hockney show in Paris and came back with a new color palette. We named a pair of pants after the 9th Street Women - the cool, paint-splattered fatigues Helen Frankenthaler & Grace Hartigan wore in their East Village studios. And on our Instagram, we love to post inspo (I’d like to think we were doing it before The Row tysm).
This isn’t new. Artists have borrowed from fashion - and fashion from artists - for centuries (there’s a reason the Met has a Costume Institute & The Museum at FIT has a whole exhibit dedicated to it rn).
It’s quite literally…wearable art.
Today, we’re looking at three history-making fashion x art collaborations that changed everything: Dali x Schaperilli, Mondrian x Yves Saint Laurent, and Warhol x Versace.
Plus, some of my favorite fashion voices are sharing THEIR fashion collab picks (stay for deep cuts!).
And make sure you comment YOUR favorite fashion x art moment below.
The very first Art x Fashion Collab
But first…what was the first art × fashion collab?
It’s the early 1900s, and Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret is the man of the hour. In France, they call him Le Magnifique. In America, he’s known as “The King of Fashion.”
He’s often credited as the first modern couturier - and he’ll forever be remembered for freeing us women from corsets into looser fits & being pro-bra instead. But he also had the cunning to do something else…
In 1910, he hired a Fauvist painter - Raoul Dufy - to design printed silks for his couture house. It was a match made in art heaven. Dufy was known for painting scenes of the good life - regattas, orchestras, palm-lined promenades - in bold color. Poiret took that genius and turned it into something you can wear.
The result: woodblock-printed textiles in Fauvist color. Take a look…
In his memoir The King of Fashion (1931), Poiret wrote, “Am I a fool when I dream of putting art into my dresses, a fool when I say dressmaking is an art? For I have always loved painters … It seems to me that we practice the same craft.”
In his mind, dressmaking and painting were the same craft. It’s no surprise that a couple of decades later, avant-garde designer Elsa Schiaparelli agreed.
3 Art x Fashion Collabs You Need to Know
1. Salvador Dalí x Elsa Schiaparelli (1936)
No one knows exactly how Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli first met. A Paris salon? A premiere? One of Dalí’s Surrealist dinner parties? However it began, they turned Surrealism into wearable art, launching one of the most iconic art × fashion collaborations in history - and a lifelong friendship to match.
The collab:
