Didattica e ricerca per le opere di parole e di immagini |
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Norman
Rosenthal, the exhibitions director of the Royal Academy of Arts, recently
commented that a fashion show would be staged over his "dead body".
Yet important art museums all over the world have begun to display the collections
of famous contemporary fashion designers. The pioneer in this kind of exhibition
was the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in late 2000, displaying
a wide range of work by Giorgio Armani. Soon after all the other important
galleries in the world, and especially in fashion cities like Florence, London
and Paris, have had similar fashion exhibitions.
In
London, the Victoria & Albert Museum has established the work of two great
international designers, Versace in 2002 and Ossie Clark (now showing till
May 2004). Despite Rosenthal's words, the Royal Academy of Arts is now opening,
in the newly acquired building in Burlington Gardens, a retrospective of the
Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani. So what happened to Mr Rosenthal?
How can a fashion exhibition take place among the classic art of Donatello,
Raphael and van Dyck? Is something changing in the palaces of high art?
Traditionally
fashion has not been considered art, but something related to our every day
life. Looking backwards over
the last twenty years however, things have changed. The media has recognized
fashionıs potential as a significant cultural force, gaining respectability
among other popular phenomena such as theatre, journalism, advertising and
film. Fashion has been positioned in this literature as an important conduit
for the expression of social identity and aesthetic taste; it has at last
begun to generate a critical literature too, that it can properly call its
own. Furthermore, Universities all around the world have established academic
courses about fashion's history, construction, style and patterns of "usage";
in British Universities these kind of courses have been in existence since
the mid-1960s. Despite the presence of fashion in the British education system,
the academicians still consider the economic context of fashion as an inseparable
part of it. For the academicians to consider fashion as art, its venal context
would need to be exchanged and fashion seen as a creative idea; in fact many
important fashion designers are trying to withdraw from the world of industrial
manufacture, to get closer to the artistic creation of the masterpieces. And
it is precisely a fashion exhibition that allows for considerations of form
and surface that, though restricted by the fixed environment and constraints
of display, offer the wonderful opportunity to understand the meaning of fashion
as art. An exhibition can show the processes of creative authorship, technological
production and, above all, artistic idea.
Fashion covers many different kinds of "Arts", with a capital letter, such as Music, Theatre, Photography, Design and many others among the minor arts, or as applied arts; fashion sponsors its artistic dimension with prizes, such as the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, awarded to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art. So why can't fashion be an art to write with a capital letter? Because maybe it is too material to be art? Because of its economic context? Or maybe just because it could be understood by everyone and the palaces of high art are afraid not to be an elite anymore? I really think that fashion is an art with a capital letter because it's part of the human genius, whose history was born with painting many centuries ago. As with other arts, it was born from necessity, and developed over the years into something ornamental and aesthetic only. Now that it has reached its top, fashion claims its spot in the arts' society. To quote from a fashion advertisement I saw recently: "Apparently there are more important things than fashion. Yeah right!"