Madeleine Vionnet dress
Cubism is both the original and the most compelling argument for flat fashion, and so interest in it is rekindled with each turn toward the flat. That flatness is also easy for fashion: not every geometric textile design for a dress is a return to cubism. Extraordinary embroideries derive from the initiatives of Picasso, emphasizing the plane but also enjoying fashion’s innate fancy and extravagance. Yet, it is hard to say that this art selection is anything other than predictable at the end of the century in which Picasso has been seen as one of our most heroic artists.(SmithR. 1998)
On the contrary, it is those designers who think again in the mode of cubism who verify its true persistence and potential for expanded presence. Thus, Rei Kawakubo’s wrapping and twisting, obviating front and back, may be a sign of the original cubism, even as it is taken on as a late-century enterprise.
For Geoffrey Beene, the influence is Vionnet and the possibility of the sheer plane that circumnavigates the body as he does, gently with lace inserts, ridges, and gentle incisions. Especially important to the innovative designers are the twists of Vionnet, defying fashion’s conventions but also letting a little three-dimensionality flex its way onto the flat field of dress.
Madeleine Vionnet dress, 1920s
Indeed, such fashion designers as Ronaldus Shamask and Yeohlee have been chiefly identified with the hard arts of architecture vis-à-vis fashion, but they might be more comfortably accommodated by cubism as a soft, easy art of modified representation apt to fashion and its humanism. Further, such soft notes define the humanism of long-term cubism. Christian Francis Roth takes his blocks and cylinders from the colourful vocabulary of Sonia Delaunay. It is not a various unnamed and hard-to-describe efforts at a supple planarity, for they are, in fact, never equated with cubism and seldom with art.(SmithR. 1998)
Smith, R. 1998, Design review, A fashion Statement Draped in Cubism.
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