The Trick Fashion Designers Use to Stay on Top – Wall Street Journal

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At show after show—particularly in Paris—fashion designers touted artist collaborations. For Off-White, the It-brand of the moment, designer Virgil Abloh called upon New York graffiti artist Futura to scrawl on suits, T-shirts and airy parkas. At Valentino, illustrator Roger Dean, whose rainbow-hued landscapes once graced 1970s prog-rock album covers, was tapped to draw vivid scenes for sweaters and button-ups. The Dior runway incorporated an installation by New York sculptor Daniel Arsham, who also worked on cross-body bags that looked like dusty archeological relics. And Japan’s Undercover showed moody black rain slickers stamped with photographs by seminal American photographer Cindy Sherman.

“Kind of necessary” is how Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, from his perch in the front row of Louis Vuitton show, described the links with art that fashion shows increasingly feature. He might, of course, be biased: For 13 years, starting in 2002, Mr. Murakami partnered with Louis Vuitton (then designed by Marc Jacobs) on Fruit-Loop-hued handbags as lively as Mr. Murakami’s paintings. This season, he was just another fashion fan, sitting in the audience at several shows, including those of Off-White, Raf Simons and Rick Owens.

There was no shortage of artists in attendance at the shows. Off-White’s audience was perhaps the most conspicuously arty, including: Bill Powers, the owner of Half Gallery in New York; Lucien Smith, a burgeoning painter that is represented by Mr. Powers; and Sterling Ruby, the German-born artist, who partnered in 2014 with Belgian designer Raf Simons to translate dramatic paint-splattered canvases into prints for jeans and denim shirts (and who just showed his own bona fide fashion collection in Florence).

Why have fashion-art couplings grown more common and “kind of necessary” in the five years since? A couple of reasons. First, the demands of the high-fashion industry typically obligate designers to churn out at least two collections per year. Drafting an ally from the art-world can take some of that pressure off—bringing in novelty and fresh ideas. As Bruce Pask, the men’s fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, puts it, artists are “just a totally perfect repository of great visual inspiration and information.”

Men’s fashion is also, as Mr. Pask pointed out, going through a particularly graphic phase, fueled by digital culture. Both Instagram and e-commerce platforms hunger for colorful clothes like the button-up, slip-on versions of Mr. Dean’s surreal landscapes that Valentino has strategically released into the social-media (and, as of next spring) retail wilds.

An artist can also lend a clothing collection cultural cachet and boost a weary designer’s morale. Inviting “somebody of that caliber who you respect…to play in your sandbox, that feels really good,” said American-born Paris-based designer Rick Owens of his footwear collaboration with British artist Thomas Houseago, whose work has been shown at the Whitney Museum in New York City and the Royal Academy of Art in London.

But fashion-artist collaborations can also make observations on the world we live in. Mr. Abloh, who designs both Off-White and Louis Vuitton’s menswear, is the most prominent American streetwear designer to be embraced by high-end Parisian fashion. In an email response to an inquiry about the inspiration behind the graffiti-based pieces in his spring 2020 Off-White collection, he explained that he sees parallels between streetwear and the graffiti-rooted art of his new collaborator, Futura: “Streetwear at one point was something little known to the mass public.” Similarly, Mr. Abloh continued, works by graffiti artists, originally fringe and “once seen as vandalism,” are now “being sold for millions of dollars.” Mr. Abloh’s spring 2020 Off-White collection can be seen as a comment on the growing commodity value of both streetwear and graffiti.

Perhaps no designer leverages the cachet of artists more regularly than Kim Jones, the creative director at Dior Men. Each of Mr. Jones’s collections in his nearly two years at the brand has included a collaboration with a bold-face name in the art world, including sought-after British artist Kaws and American painter Raymond Pettibon. Mr. Jones has said in press releases and interviews that working with artists is his way to pay homage to

Christian Dior
’s

own period as an art dealer. The collaborations lend depth to Mr. Jones work, placing the clothes in an artistic legacy.

For shoppers, these artists collaborations are a way to attain something from an artist whose work would otherwise be out of reach. Though a sweatshirt from Dior’s collaboration with Kaws still retails for a hefty $995, that’s a fraction of the millions that one of Kaws’s giant Mickey Mouse-esque “Companion” statues fetches at auction. “These collaborations with designers are another way in, another point of entry for a client who might not be able to afford a piece on the wall,” said Bergdorf Goodman’s Mr. Pask. While the resale value in fashion may not rival that of the art world, if you keep the tags on there’s always

eBay
.

Write to Jacob Gallagher at [email protected]