On a grey day last month, Jay-Z and Beyoncé were photographed stepping out of an SUV in an anonymous, muddy backstreet in southeast London. One clue as to why they had chosen to visit such an unprepossessing area of the capital was written in large letters on Jay-Z’s sweatshirt: “MUSIC FASHION”. The other was the white-haired artist waiting to greet them.
The pair were visiting one of Britain’s most distinguished sculptors, Anish Kapoor, for a personal tour of his studio. Alongside the spectacular wealth they have amassed through their music and fashion businesses, Mr and Mrs Carter have developed an interest in art. Like many other art lovers, they were in town for Frieze week, when the world’s wealthiest consumers and wiliest retailers gather in London for the celebrated art fair, and the city becomes a hive of intense cultural and commercial activity. And if Jay-Z’s lyrics for his 2013 single Picasso Baby are to be believed, he will be parking his “Twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel”, and joining the international art crowd for the next stage of the art fair world tour: Art Basel Miami Beach, which opens on December 4. There, the art-fair phenomenon will start all over again, only this time in the heat of the Florida sun. More than 250 galleries will set out their stalls. Purchases will be made, based on judgments of taste, style, budget and size, and shipped home, all in time for Christmas.
This is not shopping and retail, however, this is collecting and dealing — small but significant distinctions that reveal the traditional divide between how the business of art and the business of fashion are seen. “Fashion is not art. Never,” Jean-Paul Gaultier once snapped at a reporter, and many artists would hasten to agree. Fashion is readily associated with ephemera, frivolity and excess, while art is often shrouded in language that emphasises longevity, seriousness and intellectual significance.
Nevertheless, there will be a strong fashion presence in Miami this year. “Of course,” Caroline Rush, CEO of the British Fashion Council, says when I asked her if many people from the fashion world would be going. In fact, this year Art Basel will be preceded by the first New York Times International Luxury Conference. Those who work in the fields of art, technology, design and fashion — the “global creative industries” — will be gathering to discuss their increasingly entwined interests.
From the haute couture concoctions of Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali to the latest reimagining of the Louis Vuitton logo by Frank Gehry, Marc Newson and Cindy Sherman, artists and fashion designers have enjoyed a long and largely amenable history of collaborating. But, in recent years, these creative flirtations have grown steadily more serious, and, quite honestly, it is getting confusing. The names of top fashion brands are splashed across the invitations to exhibition openings and art prizes; galleries and museums are popular venues for extravagant fashion shows and parties; department stores host pop-up exhibitions; and products designed with artists, or inspired by artists, are being launched all the time.
A cursory glance at the recent exhibition programme of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London gives an idea of the bewildering range of ways the fashion and art worlds now merge. There was the Juergen Teller exhibition last year — a photographer who made his name in fashion, but is now regarded as an artist. Mary Katrantzou designed the costumes for the artist Pablo Bronstein’s 2011 show; Giles Deacon and the house of Alexander McQueen participated in last year’s off-site exhibition, A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now, at the Old Selfridges Hotel; and the high-end fashion department store Dover Street Market played host to another off-site exhibition, scattered throughout its six floors. The executive chairman of the ICA, Gregor Muir, says they “have been inundated with requests from fashion brands to support our programme”.
Adrian Riches, the head of sponsorship at Frieze Art Fair, whose partners have included Alexander McQueen, Cos, Gap, Gucci and Selfridges, reports a similar swell in interest from fashion labels. “As the Frieze art fairs have grown, so have our audience and reach,” he says. “As a result, the benefit we receive from fashion brands has grown significantly, too.”
The design bible Garage with a Jeff Koons-inspired cover
Although the surreally high prices that contemporary art achieves at auction suggest a buoyant market — the most expensive artwork (Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud) sold last year went for £89.6m — big retailers are becoming key patrons of the arts. As government subsidies to public institutions decline, large sections of the art world are increasingly reliant on such private funding. The Tate’s annual expenditure, for example, is about £83m — most of which it has to raise itself.
Luxury fashion brands are a natural place to turn for financial patronage. The international art market made £37bn in total sales of art and antiques in 2013, close to its highest recorded total. The luxury-goods market, however, generated almost five times as much — about £184bn. Placing this relationship in neat perspective is the French billionaire François Pinault, founder of the luxury-goods conglomerate Kering, which includes labels such as Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Yves Saint Laurent, and who is the majority shareholder of Christie’s auction house.
Yet art and fashion form a natural alliance that extends beyond mere money. “Our partnerships with fashion brands are enormously valuable, not just in financial terms,” says Riches, “but more broadly by providing access to wider audiences.” Muir says this is not simply philanthropy — there are numerous mutual benefits to the relationship. “The audience for fashion-related events and exhibitions is completely engaged with the more artistic side of the industry,” he says. “We really enjoy working with our friends in the world of fashion. They have much to offer, and approach us with creative ideas.”
“Fashion designers and artists are able to push each other when they collaborate,” Rush says. “Designers are used to working to the very tight timeframes set by the fashion machine, while artists are used to having more freedom to develop the underlying concept.”
But could this billion-dollar love affair be a short-term infatuation? Is it simply another trend, tethered to commercial success? Rush thinks not, especially in London, which is well established as a hub for innovation and creative rebellion. “It is an organic relationship that arises from shared social circles and influences, and has evolved from living in the same areas and attending the same universities,” she says.
Muir hints at an ingrained cultural snobbery that might explain why fashion brands are eager to align themselves with contemporary art. “For the ICA, fashion is an art form that we tend to take more seriously than other arts organisations,” he says. Art is able to provide valuable cultural capital to fashion brands, which can then help them gain a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. “The brands we partner with”, Riches says, “seek to benefit by aligning themselves with our high-profile art-world events, which they can leverage to demonstrate a brand’s values, whether that be innovation and creativity or to appear cutting-edge.”
Bernard Arnault, another spectacularly wealthy French luxury-goods magnate, has — quite literally — turned this lucrative synergy into an art form. Last month saw the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Designed by Frank Gehry and rumoured to have cost £91m, it is the first privately funded leading cultural institution in France. And, of course, it will also host LVMH fashion shows.
Meanwhile, next spring, the Prada Foundation will open a new contemporary arts complex in Milan, designed by Rem Koolhaas. “From a business perspective, it is clearly a relationship that works,” says a luxury trend analyst at Euromonitor International. “As the economic downturn has polarised wealth, we are seeing more luxury companies seeking out more inventive strategies — whether that be creating diffusion lines, or diversifying into different categories.” She points to the collaboration between Tracey Emin, the Serpentine Gallery and Comme des Garçons to create a limited edition of new fragrances called Serpentine as an example of what to expect. The relationship can also be seen in the design magazine Garage: the latest issue stars Cara Delevingne as seen through the eyes of Jeff Koons.
There are clear signs from the art establishment that it is a relationship that is only getting stronger. Next year, the Tate promises to show the full breadth of Sonia Delaunay’s work — with textiles, clothes and costume design, as well as her abstract paintings — in a solo show. In February, the ICA will host a solo show of the work of Viviane Sassen, a photographer whose vivid, inventive images gracefully straddle fashion and art. The following month, one of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most successful exhibitions ever, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, will open at the V&A.
This is a mutable relationship that has as many sides as a Frank Gehry building, and is as unpredictable as Beyoncé’s next hairstyle. The fashion industry also appears to be taking lessons from its notoriously secretive counterpart and is pulling a cloak of mystery tightly around its financial affairs. But whatever their combined wealth/commercial worth, if they continue to work together to produce independent, imaginative and inspiring creations, then let’s hope that this is another powerful pair that will remain crazy in love.