Art to Wear

American movement founded by Julie Schafler Dale in the 1960s. It was based on the concept of clothes as a form of wearable art. After graduation from the School of Fine Arts of New York University, Dale became interested in the relationship between fashion and avant-guard art. In 1973 in Manhattan she opened the Artisans Gallery where she offered one-off designs quite different from what the clothing industry produced. She was in this way able to influence the most forward-looking fashion designers, often inspired by oriental cultures and primitive societies which didn’t separate art from handicraft. The materials used by the artists belonging to this movement were very eclectic, ranging from leather to yarns, but also including feathers, paper, silicon, PVC, and metal, as in the gold blouse created by Mark Mahall in 1978 and made from 25,000 interlaced safety pins to form an iridescent fabric. This blouse is in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Paper hand-painted kimonos, silk tunics with designs printed in silicone — like those created by Carol Motty in 1985 — and sculpture-like ruffs in crochet that reproduced the skyline of Manhattan in three dimensions were all works which, though unique, were strongly linked to each other by a common thread: the idea of art to wear. Commited to skill and craftsmanship, and decidedly against consumer standardization, the members of the Artisans Gallery sought to create harmony between the art-garment and the person who wore it. They designed expressive shapes that were not purely contemplative but were artistic creations in which one could wrap oneself, an act which combined art and life both symbolically and materially.