Fashion as a Medium

Artist Statement

As I considered which medium I would choose for this piece, several ideas, each one worse than the previous one flashed through my mind. I thought of film, photography, painting, and music. It wasn’t, however, until I read that the almost-legendary designer Marc Jacobs announced that he would be leaving Louis Vuitton that I realized what I wanted to create.

            Marc Jacobs has been known for his extravagant, nonsexualized or overly sexualized to the point of fetishism, strange and otherworldly designs (examples can be found here, here, and here). He is the poster boy for fashion as spectacle and it was with this idea in mind that I began creating my piece. I decided to approach fashion as an art form and not really as a wearable medium. I purchased several articles of clothing and removed any utility from them by ripping, tearing, and cutting them. I then modeled them in a dimly-lit, grimy parking lot. In order to focus on the clothing and not on photography, I did not edit the shots and only used the camera’s automatic focus.

            My attempt was to show fashion’s potential as art and not merely as clothing. In the upper-class ultra-rich portion of society, the same fashion may be worn that three weeks earlier was parading down a catwalk in Paris. In the normal, middle-class portion of society, however, fashion is considered something merely to be worn and used. In such circles, luxury fashion is often considered to be unnecessary, over-priced, and in some cases a complete and utter waste of time. I find both approaches to be wrong in some respects. I believe that some fashion is not designed for wearing (see Marc Jacob’s Fall 2012 Collection), but should be appreciated and interpreted for what it is: an art form. We would not judge an experimental film because it does not conform to our ideas of traditional narrative; in like manner, we should not judge extravagant and almost-unwearable fashion because it does not conform to our ideas of utility.

            Through showing fashion that is not wearable and is not beautiful, I showed that fashion itself can stand apart from mere clothing. It is an art form of its own and should be appreciated as such. Just as McCloud in his piece “Show and Tell” argues that a change in the perception of drawing and writing should occur and is occurring, I believe that a change in the perception of fashion as art will positively affect both the fashion world and the art world.