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Recognition of an Art: Haute Couture
The most emblematic museums open their doors to the most prestigious firms. In parallel, scores of exhibition centres are showcasing the best designers worldwide.
"Fashion is not art, but to devote oneself to it one must be an artist". This statement by the grand master of French couturiers, Yves Saint-Laurent, has been taken one step further. Fashion, at least that produced by the most prestigious designers, is currently viewed as another artistic discipline. Proof of this is that couturiers have attained the level of creators, having exhibitions, and even buildings, set up around them.
Exhibitions on their work elicit a great deal of interest among the public. No-one could have foretold the success enjoyed by Alexander McQueen's designs when they were showcased at the New York Metropolitan – with more than 600,000 visitors, it became the eighth most viewed exhibition at this centre. The Balenciaga Museum has also surpassed every expectation, with more than 45,000 visitors in the just over three months since it was established.
Artistic prestige
The attitude of museums towards fashion has changed and has brought it out from the wardrobes into the showcases. For the director of the Balenciaga Museum, Javier González de Durana, with wide-ranging experience at the head of exhibition centres, "until recently there was this academicist prejudice that differentiated between major and minor arts, pure arts and applied arts, art aimed at the mind and crafts aimed at the body ". Currently, a painting or sculpture, a frock or a piece of furniture are viewed with the same "dignity and estimation", because "two good pieces of art created by incisive minds have each as much to ‘say’ as the other, disregarding the fact that one of them has been created to dress a person". And among such privileged minds is Balenciaga who, like Jesús del Pozo, is viewed as an ‘architect of volume’ owing to the proximity of his designs to the world of sculpture.
Fashion has always evolved by drawing from architecture, painting, sculpture (John Galliano has a line inspired in Dalí and Yves Saint Laurent in Mondrian) and has succeeded in perfectly capturing its time, reflecting, as other arts do, the society of their time and becoming a key part of History. Hence the proliferation of fashion exhibitions and the interest they awaken for art centres. In London several of them are competing to host a permanent exhibition of the late Alexander McQueen.
Tour of exhibitions
But he is not the only designer awarded a solo exhibition. 130 are comprised in the show ‘Jean Paul Gaultier World of Fashion’ –in Madrid in the Autumn of 2012– and more than 300 in that of Yves Saint Laurent. Only half of his designs will form part of the show scheduled by the Mapfre Foundation of Madrid –from 5 October to 8 January 2012– to pay tribute to this creator.
The major brands also create their own museums. The latest to join the list is the firm Gucci, which just a few days ago inaugurated its own exhibition house to celebrate its 90th anniversary. Situated in Piazza della Signoria (Florence), it showcases some of the most valuable pieces created by Guccio Gucci.
Louis Vuitton, in turn, has been trying to launch its own Foundation for the last five years – it is paralysed by the neighbours' opposition – to display in Paris, the heart of Haute Couture, a retrospective of their artistic work, featuring the best of the firm's production since its foundation in 1854.
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Published in Fashion and Beauty by Patricia Rivera on 30/09/2011
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