Art into Fashion_series 1

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Art, on the other hand, is more economical with eternal truths these days, replacing master narratives with tentative tales of embodiment and identity. Historically, the ideal nude stood for value and permanence; the fashion silhouette, though no less idealised, represented inconstancy and mutability. In recent years these antithetical images have converged on the terrain of the fragile, mutable, human body which artists have represented as abject, traumatised and fissured. Designers too have played with its parameters; Georgina Godley experimented with a row of Barbie dolls whose bodies she altered with plasticine, before producing her biomorphic dresses in the mid-1980s.

Lun'na Menoh_s/s collection 1770-1998,1998

Menoh, based in Los Angeles, is a fashion designer turned artist. This work evokes the ghosts of women and past dresses in uninhabited shapes which trace the evolution of the clothed female body.

‘life is threatening to become public’ wrote the de Goncourt brothers in their journal in the 1960s and, as meaning mutates to the surface of things, fashion has more and more to say about the society of the spectacle. Modernity puts fashion centre-stage as part of the theatiricalization of everyday life and the staging of the self.