Is fashion art? Curators Émilie Hammen, Elizabeth Way and Arturo Galansino discuss the overlapping histories of fashion and art, and how contemporary designers are reconfiguring fashion’s place in culture.
‘Art, going back to the Renaissance, is emotional. It’s intellectual, is apart from the body even as they paint are painting real life.’ says Way. ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and the arts and crafts movement took high art down from the wall and put it on the body, in their homes, in their lives.’
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The Frieze Masters Talks programme and the Frieze Masters Podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with dunhill.
About the speakers
Émilie Hammen is a fashion historian and director of Palais Galliera, Paris. Elizabeth Way is a writer and curator at the Museum of Fashion, Institute of Technology, New York. They are joined by their host Arturo Galansino, art historian, curator, director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and this year’s curator of the Frieze Masters Talks programme.
About the Frieze Masters Podcast
The Frieze Masters Podcast is back for 2025, bringing you seven conversations across art history curated by Arturo Galansino (Director General of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence).
Entitled ‘Woven Histories’ and recorded live at Frieze Masters 2025, this year’s series features artists, curators and thinkers, whose conversations weave together geographies and chronologies, and challenge us to look at history in new and unexpected ways.
Topics range from the evolving relationship between fashion and art to the role of the archive in Black history, the last Mughals and their cultural influence in India and the enduring inspiration of the old masters and renaissance art on contemporary making. Speakers include artists Tracey Emin, Glenn Brown and Antony Gormley, museum directors and curators Nicholas Cullinan, Émilie Hammen, Elizabeth Way and Carl Strehlke, and writers Edward George, Matthew Harle, Christopher Rothko and William Dalrymple.
Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
The Frieze Masters Talks programme and the Frieze Masters Podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with dunhill.
Transcript
Emanuela Tarizzo: Welcome to series four of the Frieze Masters Podcast. Brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with Dunhill. I’m Emanuela Tarizzo, Director of Frieze Masters, and this podcast brings you our collection of talks from this year’s Frieze Masters fair.
In this episode, recorded at Dunhill’s Bourdon House in central London, Arturo’s guests are the director of the Palais Galliera, Émilie Hammen, and Elizabeth Way, Associate Curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Together they ask the question ‘is fashion art?’
Here’s Arturo to introduce this week’s talk.
Arturo Galansino: We are in one of the temples of elegance in London, you know, the British fashion Dunhill general quarter Bourdon House. We are very excited, of course it’s not, you know, a common location to have a talk about art history, and ah, it’s very elegant, very dapper I think. It’s great to be here tonight.
Émilie and Liz are two of the most important historians, specialists of the history of fashion, especially the connection between art and fashion. So I think their talk is going to be very interesting because they’re going to tell us about this history, this relationship between art and fashion, spanning from the 19th Century until today.
We are also going to speak about how to display fashion, you know, now for us is very normal to go and see a fashion show in a museum but this is quite recent. So we are also going to speak about that, the challenges involved in displaying fashion objects.
AG: Okay, let’s start with you dear Liz. Could you briefly tell us about the connection between art and fashion from the beginning of the modernity with Paris at his capital. Of course, you know, I’m thinking about Manet, Dega, who captured the fabric, the elegance of this new emerging modern society. Yes, and maybe you can also go through Surrealism, Futurism, you know the story. Please go.
Elizabeth Way: So if we think about the relationship between art and fashion starting in the mid 19th century, you really have a big change that’s happening in fashion. You have the introduction of the haute Couture and so many couturiers, starting with Worth, who’s often credited as the first, saw themselves as artists. Many, many people saw them as dress makers, and as artisans, and as workers, but he really positioned himself as an artist and that what he did was on par. And so you have that kind of movement within fashion, trying to move itself towards art. But then you also have art that is really interested in capturing realism and the modern city, and the urban environment is so crucial to this. And so if you are looking at real life in the city, then you have to capture fashion. So if you look at Monet or Seurat or any of these, um, painters of modern life, you have a lot of people thinking about this connection, Baudelaire, et cetera. But, you also have this fine art world that is not interested in the commerciality of fashion. For them, art, going back to the Renaissance is emotional, it’s intellectual, it is apart from the body even as they paint are painting real life. But at the same time you have all of this industrialization and you start to see people reject kind of the negative outcomes of this industrialization. We’re still in this moment when we think about sustainability.
But they’re starting to see these negative effects, and so you start to see artists who are pushing back against it and they’re using fashion as a piece of this anti industrial life they’re trying to create. So we’re thinking about the Pre-Raphaelites, we’re thinking about the Arts and Crafts movement, and people who are trying to take high art down from the wall and put it on the body, but also put it in their furniture, put it in their, in their homes, in their lives.
And so in this way, we see this relationship between art and fashion shift and kind of come together. And this really carries through into the turn of the 20th century, if you look at movements like the Art Nouveau or Art Deco, it’s really strongest, it’s most kind of, most articulate in decorative arts, fashion, furniture, things like that.
So by the time we get to the Surrealists, um, we get to Dada, we get to all of these movements, fashion is such a part of the lived experience that artists are much more interested in capturing than they were in the mid 19th century. And so fashion just becomes a part of the furniture of their expression, and we see a real rejection of that by the time we get to the mid 20th century, and then, you know, come back in with popular culture in the 1960s. So there’s always this, this shifting relationship. Not so much of how fashion sees art, fashion always wants to be a little closer to art, but really from the other side, how art is viewing fashion.
AG: Émilie, which female figures stand out in this process, or in this pairing between art and fashion? I was thinking especially about Sonia Delaunay or Coco Chanel. Can you tell us about some pioneer in this, uh, relationship between art and fashion?
Émilie Hammen: Yeah, I think that the two names you just mentioned are extremely and equally interesting. Sonia Delaunay, as we know, and as we’ve become more familiar with the, uh, exhibitions that were dedicated to her over the last few years. Finally, just a Sonia Delaunay exhibition. And, we’ve had one in Paris a little over 10 years ago, travelled to Tate, if I’m correct, and more recently in New York there was also a wonderful Sonia Delaunay exhibition sort of re-looking at her life.
And I think she’s a fascinating case study because as we know, she’s someone who comes from painting, her first interest in visual arts was through painting. Yet at the same time, we’re also very much aware through the narrative that we’ve been sharing about Sonia Delaunay, through catalogues and exhibitions, that she had this very strong connection with textiles.
And what I found very interesting in Sonia Delaunay is throughout her entire life, from her time as a young woman being taught how to stitch, to sew, to embroider, to her life as a young mother, there’s the iconic example of the blanket that she makes for her newborn son. This we know quite well, but as she progresses in her career as a painter, she’s never really going to let go of this textile component. She’s going to open a couture house, it’s going to be tricky, she’s not gonna be really good at the whole business side of things. But I found fascinating that throughout her entire career, she’s going to continue producing textiles, prints for the fashion industry.
She’s gonna have key collaborations with couturiers in Paris, with department store throughout Europe, and, she says it herself, it’s really this back and forth that Liz was mentioning. For her, the research and the intention that she puts in her painting feeds her design and textile and fashion. And it’s also the other way around.
And so in my own research, I’ve always been really interested because we always consider what does fashion borrow from high art, from fine art, but in fact there’s a lot that art borrows from fashion. And there’s lots of references, as Liz was explaining, but if we go back indeed to the time of Dadaism and early Surrealism, the whole commercial discourse of fashion is interesting for them.
They look at ads, they look at, I mean, think of Marcel Duchamp’s Eau de Voilette, for instance. It’s a perfume bottle and it’s really connecting with this world of fashion, both its creativity and its commercial aspect that I feel artists have found equally interesting.
AG: Okay, let’s talk about this collaboration between the world of fashion and the world of art. Which are the limit of this kind of collaboration?
EW: I think the collaboration is successful when it feels authentic and when you have a brand and an artist that feels like they’re moving in the same direction. And I think you hit the limit when you when you kind of cross over that authenticity. For Kusama, I think is what’s really interesting is that she, like Delaunay, experimented a lot with textiles and fashion. She had her own kind of art wear brand in the 1960s, so fashion wasn’t foreign territory for her. But also, Louis Vuitton has been really interested in art, really driven by Marc Jacobs and his love of contemporary art.
And he found ways that borrowed a lot from kind of what the pop artists were doing in the 1960s, what Andy Warhol was doing, to kind of bring certain kinds of art that worked with the Louis Vuitton brand, especially the visual culture of that brand. For example, the Superflat style coming out of Japan and the way he, adapted that for a bag. I mean, that first collaboration happened in 2003 and it was just relaunched. You know, it’s become iconic in the worlds of fashion and art. So I think that in collaborations between artists and brands, there has to be some sort of, kind of underlying relationship from both sides to really see it come together.
And going back historically, you can think about Christian Bérard and Christian Dior and the way that they work together, or, most famously Schiaparelli and, um, Dali. And these are people who have similar sensibilities in the way that they’re creating.
And if you look at a fashion designer who is interested in ideas, they work in ways that are closer to artists. And so you always see these collaborative, these really beautiful collaborative relationships within the arts. So if they can find that synergy, I think it can come off really, in a way that you’re creating something new, something important, something that says something about the culture in society. Otherwise, I think it comes off as a little, uh, it can be read a little cynically.
ÉH: And if I may, I think what’s interesting as well is when it’s a collaboration between an artist and a creative director or designer, because a collaboration between an artist and a brand is a whole other thing, right? Uh, and going back indeed to Marc Jacobs and what he did in reaching out to Murakami, to Stephen Sprouse, which was very much part of his culture and his art scene in, in New York. I feel that this is quite meaningful and it really opened a new era for these designer, artist, stylist collaborations. Because Louis Vuitton, when we think about it, is a man born in 1820’s France. So it’s not really Louis Vuitton collaborating with, uh, Yayoi Kusama, because, So I feel it’s quite moving and meaningful when it’s actually two human beings connecting creatively.
EW: And, and these are also artists who, for impractical terms have art that can translate into a textile print. You know, if you can’t make it recognizable, if you can’t, if the artist can’t say something about their work in the piece that they’re creating, then there’s really no point. So Marc Jacobs was really savvy about taking things that he loved, but also making it into a marketable product.
AG: Let’s go back to the origin of your work as a curator of history of fashion, because I think we all recognize that the starting point was at The Met the beginning of the seventies with Diana Vreeland, right? The legendary Diana Vreeland. For the first time in the history of museum, fashion entered this museum and they became, uh, uh, you know, objects worth of attention, of study, of curation.
ÉH: Agree to disagree. It was an important turning point. Most certainly.
AG: But as scholars and curators of fashion, okay, why does fashion matter, to all of us?
ÉH: No, no, going back to Diana Vreeland, of course, she had such an important role in the history of fashion exhibitions, and perhaps, uh, for, for a reason that allows me also, to answer your question, she was not a scholar. She was, uh, not a professional curator, she was someone who produced fashion and produced fashion images. She came from Harper’s Bazaar, from Vogue, she was an, an image maker, uh, a storyteller. And her deep connections with the industry, with the couturiers that she knew quite well over the decades. It’s with this knowledge, and arguably with this passion, that she came to the museum. I wasn’t there in 1972, but from what I understand, the exhibition that she created really provoked these emotions. And, and indeed the,
AG: the first was Balenciaga, right?
ÉH: Yes. Uh, the world of Balenciaga, um, Balenciaga had just passed away, so it was a um, way of looking at one of the most prolific and talented couturiers of the 20th century.
But she was very much about drama, about bringing the emotion, a very theatrical emotion. And I feel that this is also what brings people into museums. People that perhaps don’t feel that they’re as welcome, or can feel intimidated by Modern Art, by an artistic discourse that’s not always easy to, uh, appreciate if you don’t have the correct training. And at least fashion and emotions, clothes are, yeah, everyone can relate to them. And I, I feel that this is also one of the great powers of fashion exhibitions, but with great power come great responsibilities, if I may say.
AG: Liz, what are the main challenges of exhibiting fashion in museum today?
EW: I think there is this really accessible entry point for fashion. The number one thing I hear when I walk through my galleries is I would wear that, or I wouldn’t wear that. And so you can look at this thing on a pedestal and really see your own body in it in a way that is not as possible, I think, for other forms of art. And you know, you think about fine art historically, these are things that were made either for churches or for people’s homes. So these were in some ways domestic objects, but that’s not really how they’re viewed in a museum context today.
But with fashion, there’s always the body, but in that way, sometimes I think it can seem too vernacular, not special enough, so I think it’s that storytelling aspect. It is tying it to a cultural movement with Balenciaga and Vreeland. I mean, Vreeland was so important because not that fashion had never existed in museums, but the Met is an art museum. It’s not a history museum, it’s not a city museum, it’s not old clothes that belong to someone important. It was the maker, the focus, the artist. And there’s so many ways in which Balenciaga can be looked at through the lens of architecture, through Modernism, through all of these different lenses. And you can say that about so many different designers who are connecting to culture in a different way.
So I think that’s the key, is to find that balance of what is the context here? What is this saying about our society and our culture, either at this moment or the moment that it was made, but still keeping some of that accessibility that ease that people find.
ÉH: And since we’re in London, before Vreeland there was Cecil Beaton, uh, who’s being honoured at the National Portrait Gallery right now. I still haven’t seen the exhibition, I’m quite excited. But at the V&A, Cecil Beaton, Fashion: An Anthology, that was ‘71. And it was the same idea, um, it was about creating in a way, a set, a universe, something quite immersive. Maybe less so than what we can do today with our digital tools, but it was bringing this contemporary creativity inside a museum. But arguably, you’re right, not a fine arts museum, a museum of decorative arts, of industrial arts, so that’s quite different. But still, it was a few months before Vreeland at the Met.
AG: Next time I will study more, I don’t worry about it. (Laughter)
ÉH: No, but it’s, we’re in London too, we can’t just say New York did it first. (Laughter)
AG: Émilie, listen, you just became director of one of the most prestigious fashion institutions in, in the world, Palais Galliera. What are the new direction to this important institution?
ÉH: Well, going back to this idea that fashion exhibitions draw crowds, and that they’re a very powerful way of opening museums and culture to communities, to people who don’t necessarily feel that they can be a part of it. One idea that I feel very strongly about is using fashion to, of course, connect with what makes Paris the capital city of elegance, supposedly. Uh, so haute couture, looking at this, but more importantly also looking at everyday fashion. The everyday fashion worn by Parisians, the different communities that form the city and the history of Paris. And I feel that this is also a way of sort of reframing the history of Paris, understanding that, of course, there’s the beautiful brands, there’s the dream, there’s the wonderful designers, but there’s many other names and many other practices when it comes to fashion. So maybe sort of opening up that history a little bit.
AG: I look forward to coming and see your shows. Talk about the FIT, hm, you curated the very important books, publication and, uh, of course exhibition. I just want to mention Black Designers in American Fashion, and Africa’s Fashion Diaspora. This was just last year. Very acclaimed, uh, project. Which strategies have guided your curational work at the FIT?
EW: So my interest as a fashion curator really intersects with culture, and how is fashion a cultural object that is saying something about the society that produced it. And specifically I look at the intersection of black American culture and fashion, although I do a lot of different projects at FIT. So the two strategies of those two projects that you mentioned are revisionist history, taking a history that people have some idea of, have some understanding of, and kind of introducing new players into it. So for Black Designers in American Fashion, my co-Curator and I, we laid out a pretty, um, kind of standard fashion history. One that was really based around New York and seventh Avenue, and then we introduced these designers that a lot of people hadn’t heard of, but we put them into their historical context and said like they were here too, creating these significant looks.
But for Africa’s Fashion Diaspora. I wanted to really take fashion and introduce it into a new context. So this was an exhibition that was looking at kind of international movements of black solidarity and like we’ve had these ongoing conversations to the 18th century. And you might think about the Black Arts Movement, about Négritude, about, um, Pan-Africanism.
And these are movements that exist in politics, that exist in literature, in philosophy. And we’ve had a lot of prolific writers think about these ideas, but fashion designers have also really thought about these ideas and in visually expressing through their craft, they’re adding to this contemporary conversation.
So in that way, I wanted to really point out these cultural movements, but say, “Hey, like fashion has a lot to say” and that everyday people can participate. They don’t have to write poetry, they don’t have to produce music. They can dress in a way that puts them in this international conversation.
AG: Talking about the storytelling in museums, which is becoming more and more important because the audience changes, radically changes every month, not every year now. Is there any particular garments or, um, object, or something that was proved itself very powerful in term of storytelling.
EW: So I’ll give an example that is actually very much related to art. So in Africa’s fashion diaspora, I had a beautiful kaftan created by this American Grenadian designer named Fe Noel. But she used an image of a painting by, um, Harmonia Rosales, that’s the artist’s name. And she created this beautiful painting called the Birth of Oshun, and she drew on this art historical reference. It was in reference to Botticelli’s Venus. But it was Oshun, Orisha of Love and Fertility. And because you had all of these art historical references in this painting and then you put it on a body, you had all of these stories coming through in a lot of different ways. And for me, I was really interested in this diasporic connection between West African, and Caribbean religions, syncretic religions. But that was a piece that people really responded to because it did have a really deep story, but it was also very visually obvious. And sometimes there designers, you know, they are so many different ways to communicate their stories, whether it’s in the construction, sometimes it can be quite subtle.
But I do find in exhibitions and especially if, um, the designer can kind of harness something visual, and you know, in connection with references that the audience understands, like these art historical references, it’s a really powerful combination that people get like right away.
AG: Can I ask you the same question? What is your strategy about engaging the, the crowd about with storytelling? And if you can mention any specific object.
ÉH: Yeah, maybe I can talk about the exhibition we’re gonna open in mid-December. We’re looking at the history of fashion based on our collection. So mostly French fashion, Paris Fashion. But we’re looking at it through the perspective of the makers. So of course there’s the big names, the couturiers, but what are the names behind the labels? And in fact, in Paris, you find and embroiderers, uh, weavers, pleaters, people creating with feathers, creating artificial flowers.
So we’re looking at craft, which always has this very magical appeal. When you think of craft and haute couture, you think of these dresses that you’re told need, I dunno, thousands of hours to be completed. But this is very much part of the storytelling of fashion, but what happens when you start naming the people who do the craft? And how do they work? How do they collaborate? How do they sometimes inspire the couturiers? What is the, the creative process between them all?
So we’re gonna be looking at masterpieces of craft again, pieces that are a clear demonstration of highly skilled artisanal labour. But we’re going to try to put names and photographs when we have them, of the people who make them. And this is something that we can relate to any piece of clothing that we wear. How every item of clothing is a collective work. If you go back and you start thinking of the person who built the loom to weave the fabric, and eventually the person who creates the yarn, and so on. So I’m, I’m, I’m sort of challenging my teams because I want to do a little bit like at the end of a film, you know, you have a very long, how do you say, générique, with all the credits, and I feel that in a way we should do the same for garments.
Well, people sometimes in the movie theaters leave because they don’t wanna see all these names, but to sort of acknowledge that indeed behind a jacket, there’s possibly hundreds of different people who were involved.
AG: Very true. Last question. Very important because it’s for the sponsor. (Laughter.) You know, we are in a temple of male elegance. So let’s speak a little bit about masculine fashion. Is there any particular men’s garment that has especially inspired you?
EW: Well, because we’re in London, but also Italy is a really important part of this story. I am obsessed with tailoring. I, very long time ago, I was a pattern maker, so when you look at a man’s jacket, a blazer, and you see all the layers, you see the labour, you see the pad stitching, you see the way the wool is shaped and sculpted. I’m absolutely fascinated with this process. But then you can go to Naples and see the way that those tailors have completely reduced that process and taken all of those layers out and still somehow created this same, this same structure.
And, you know, it goes back, you know, they say 1660s, but literally building a man’s body out of cloth, I love to see these jackets throughout time. So that’s something that I will never get tired of, and that can be a little unsexy in an exhibition because, you know, they’re very dark, they’re wool, which like absorbs the light, but like when you really focus in on the craft and the beauty, and the shape, they’re absolutely stunning objects.
ÉH: Yes, same for me, the tailored jacket. And I think both on a historical perspective, it’s the wonderful story of Paris and London, as two capital cities, traditionally one very much looking at men’s wear, and the other one very much claiming its title of capital of womenswear, haute couture.
And what’s incredibly interesting to understand is the back and forth as always. Um, so looking at how at the end of the 19th century, names of tailors, I’m thinking of the House of Redfern, for instance, established, and there’s many others, a store, a workshop in Paris and started dressing women. And I think this feminisation of masculine tailoring is absolutely fascinating. I like it myself because I love a good jacket. Uh, but it’s also the topic of one of our upcoming exhibitions that is looking at how women started wearing menswear throughout the long 19th century, and it’s going to be wonderful.
AG: Uh, so we all agree we all love jacket, right? Especially the Dunhill one. (Laughter) Let’s close like that. Thank you very much.
ET: Thank you for listening to the Frieze Masters podcast. Next time, Glenn Brown and Arturo Galansino discuss building a collection and a painting practice in constant dialogue with art history.
“You make mistakes when you’re painting, and those mistakes can be awful sometimes, but they can be really great at other times. And it’s that jeopardy you always go through, every time you put a mark on a painting and you can’t take it off, you’re running the risk of destroying the painting. But that’s what makes it exciting to paint.”
The Frieze Masters talks programme and podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with Dunhill. The Frieze Masters podcast is a Reduced Listening production.