Wearable art

Wearable art, refers to art pieces in the shape of clothing or jewellery pieces. These pieces are usually handmade, and are produced only once or as a very limited series. Pieces of clothing are often made with fibrous materials and traditional techniques such as crochet, knitting, quilting, but may also include plastic sheeting, metals, paper, and more. While the making of any article of clothing or other wearable object typically involves aesthetic considerations, the term wearable art implies that the work is intended to be accepted as an artistic creation or statement. Wearable art is meant to draw attention while it is being displayed, modeled or used in performances. Pieces may be sold and exhibited.

Wearable art sits at the crossroads of craft, fashion and art. The modern idea of wearable art seems to have surfaced more than once in various forms. Jewellery historians identify a wearable art movement spanning roughly the years 1930 to 1960. Textile and costume historians consider the wearable art movement to have burgeoned in the 1960s, inheriting from the 1850s Arts and Crafts.

It grew in importance in the 1970s, fueled by hippie and mod subcultures, and alongside craftivism, fiber arts and feminist art. Artists identifying with this movement are overwhelmingly women. In the late 1990s, wearable art becomes difficult to distinguish from fashion,: 142  and in the 2000s-2010s begins integrating new materials such as electronics.

History

From the late 19th century to the present, people have often chosen to wear clothes that are deliberately different from or rebellious against the dictates of high fashion. In the late 19th century, on the threshold of the modernist era, the so-called artistic or aesthetic costume (not artists' costume) was the result of a reform movement in fashion, essentially an anti-fashion. Initially associated with feminism, this trend later became a matter of general taste, and was worn mainly by members of the bourgeois intelligentsia in artistic and literary circles (as well as artists and writers themselves). This fashion found wide support not only in Great Britain, but also in the United States, Europe and, to a lesser extent, in British colonies such as Australia. It was based on the idea of the difference between handmade and mass-produced goods, and was the clothing of idealists rather than fashionistas.

In the 1920s and 1930s, fashion was considered somewhat counterculture. Such clothes and jewellery (often handmade) served as an alternative to mass production. Unusual pale colours, typical of women's dress of the previous century, were usually popular. In Australia during the same decades, designers experimented with painting scarves and textiles with modernist designs using Australian motifs (often plant-based). Obviously, handmade clothing was in contrast to mass-produced clothing. Lucy Dalgarno (1874–1945), a Sydney designer, painted fabrics and brooches using local motifs in the 1920s. Ironically, she also painted batik clothes for the upscale mass-market fashion house David Jones.

However, it was the non-conformist, anti-mass aesthetics of the 1960s counterculture that gave birth to the concept of wearable art. Not only artists, designers and intellectuals, but also men and women leading an alternative lifestyle rethought the usual links between textiles, women's work and crafts. This vividly oppositional style of clothing, dreamy, with a predominance of floral patterns, is widely known as " hippie ". It testified to the rejection of consumerist uniformity of clothing and populist politics. Decoration with handcrafted details and signs, which was originally an individual activity, gained popularity and began to be applied to standard clothing. These renegade decorators created bricolages from second-hand and hand-made fabrics and outfits in original colors, drawing inspiration from the traditions of non-European cultures: Asia, India, the Middle East. The art-a-porter style was popular on the West Coast of the United States (especially in San Francisco), in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, clothing with “autobiographical content” began to appear on the fashion market. The 1970s can be called a disorderly decade, when rough, retro and ethnic motifs, remnants of the late counter-cultural hippie style, were assimilated by the consumer, which culminated in the coarsening of styles in the second half of the 1970s. The concept of wearable art today is beginning to acquire repulsively kitsch connotations and is gradually losing relevance. 

Origins

The wearable art movement inherits from the Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to integrate art in everyday life and objects. Carefully handmade clothing was considered as a device for self-articulation and furthermore, a strategy to avoid the disempowerment of fashion users and designers by large-scale manufacturing.

The term wearable art emerges around 1975 to distinguish artworks made to be worn from body art and performance. It was used alongside the terms Artwear and "Art to Wear". An artistic movement primarily based in the United States due to a combination of financial and educational support, it found echoes in fiber and feminist arts around the world.

In the United States

In the United States, the Wearable Art movement can be traced to the early twentieth century American Craft Revival. The American Craft Revival draws on different movements seeking to unify art and craft and empower craftspersons and artists such as Japonisme, Art Nouveau, the Vienna Secession and later the Bauhaus. During and shortly after World War Two, wealthy patrons set up educational and museum institutions, in particular the American Craft Council and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, to support the renewal of crafts education. It enabled artists focused on crafts to support themselves and train new generations. For instance, famed Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers taught weaving at Black Mountain College from 1938, before chairing the craft department of California College of Arts and Crafts from 1960 to 1976.

Art schools were essential to the development of the Art to Wear movement. In the late sixties, a group of students at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Pratt Institute began integrating textile techniques in their design projects. They counted among their ranks several major figures of the Art to Wear movement, including designer Jean Cacicedo. The best known galleries supporting Wearable Art were Obiko (founded in 1972 by Sandra Sakata) in San Francisco, and Julie: Artisans' Gallery (founded in 1973 by Julie Schafler-Dale) in New York.

Outside the United States

Crafts and art education being more separated outside of the United States, it is harder to identify wearable art as an independent artistic movement. However, renewed interest in traditional textile crafts such as shibori dyeing sparked the interest of artist worldwide.

Contemporary Wearable Art

Wearable art declined as a distinct movement in the late 1990s due to competition from industry, which enabled customization at scale, the migration of artists towards haute couture or the production of small series, and the broader availability of handcrafted garments from around the world. Contemporary takes on wearable art may focus on integrating technologies in garments; using new manufacturing technique to expand possible silhouettes, such as Iris Van Herpen and Damselfrau; revisiting motifs from the art world in couture such as the 2015 Fall couture show Viktor and Rolf; or works used in performance arts such as Nick Cave's Soundsuits. Moreover, works originating from fashion may question everyday wear with provocative pieces. One example is trashion, with artists creating outrageous art garments out of trash.

Materials and Shapes

While wearable art may use any materials or shapes that is worn, and an there are trends in the techniques and types of pieces produced due to their affordances for artists.

Materials

Fibers

Crochet, embroidery, knitting, lace, quilting and felting are all commonly found in wearable art pieces. Crochet remained a homemaker's art until the late 1960s, as new artists began experimenting with free-handed crochet. This practice allowed artists to work in any shape and employ the use of colors freely, without the guidance of a pattern. The work of Janet Lipkin in the 1970s and 1980s is a good example of this technique. Machine knitting, because it enabled the rapid creation of complex knitted designs, was similarly popular as exemplified by the work of Susanna Lewis.

Electronics

As wearable computing technology develops, increasingly miniaturized and stylized equipment is starting to blend with wearable art esthetics. Low-power mobile computing allows light-emitting and color-changing flexible materials and high-tech fabrics to be used in complex and subtle ways. Some practitioners of the Steampunk movement have produced elaborate costumes and accessories which incorporate a pseudo-Victorian style with modern technology and materials.

Shapes

Kimonos and capes

Two recurring shapes in the Art to Wear movement were the kimono and the cape. The kimono enables to rapidly turn a piece of custom fabric into a garment. The cape is similarly easy to assemble and opens many opportunities for performance. The book Cut my cote, presenting patterns from historical folk wear, had a strong influence on the 1970s Art to Wear.

Jewelry

Some 20th-century modern artists and architects sought to elevate bodily ornamentation — that is, jewellery — to the level of fine art and original design, rather than mere decoration, craft production of traditional designs, or conventional settings for showing off expensive stones or precious metals. Jewelry was used by surrealists, cubists, abstract expressionists, and other modernist artists working in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Relationship to Fine Arts, Fiber Arts and Performance

Wearable artworks can be worn or designed for performances, while artists and sculptors working with fibers or other materials may create wearable pieces. The borders of wearable art are thus fuzzy, apart from artists' self-identification to a given movement or artistic community.

For instance, Electric Dress is a ceremonial wedding kimono-like costume consisting mostly of variously colored electrified and painted light bulbs, enmeshed in a tangle of wires, created in 1956 by the Japanese Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka. This extreme garment was something like a stage costume, designed only for performance. Similarly, in Nam June Paik's 1969 performance piece called TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Charlotte Moorman played a cello while wearing a brassiere made of two small operating television sets.

Designers

American artist Darla Teagarden created a dress out of paper cupcake liners, placing photographs of eyes in them. The creation is called meaningfully - Lovers Eye Archived September 20, 2015, at the Wayback Machine. American Eloise Corr Dunch created an amazing dress out of paper in the style of 16th century Spanish fashion. And Jolys Paons launched a cocktail dress with a tutu skirt, which was made from a multitude of mobile phone instructions.

In 2013, Russian designer Olga Plenkina released a wearable art collection specifically for Mercedez-Benz Fashion Week Russia. Her collection, full of aliens, sea creatures with fins and combs, demonstrated the rich imagination and great creative potential of the designer.

In 2015, at the Haute Couture show in Paris, Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren presented the "Wearable Art" collection. Initially, the painting reproductions, framed in an expensive baguette, decorated the costumes of female models, but with the appearance of the two designers on stage, their purpose instantly changed. Viktor and Rolf removed the "paintings" from the models right during the show and transformed them into part of the decorative decoration of the stage. Thus, the models easily turned into moving works of art, and the high silhouettes of the dresses, with their angular details, resembled surreal architectural fantasies.

Major exhibitions, events and organizations

Exhibitions

The Museum of Arts and Design has hosted exhibitions related to Wearable art since 1965

Art for Wearing, 1979, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Art to Wear, 1987, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

Artwear: Fashion and Anti-fashion, 2005, De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco

Off the Wall: American Art to Wear, 2019-2020, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Events

World of Wearable Art Awards, held annually since 1987 and run by Suzie Moncrieff.

Australian Wearable Art Festival, held annually since 2019.

Organizations

Fiberworks Art Center for Textile Arts, founded in 1973, closed 1987 in Berkeley

World Shibori Network

World Textile Art

Wearable Art Awards

In New Zealand, an annual competition called the New Zealand Wearable Art Awards was established in 1987. In 2001, the event was renamed the World of Wearable Art (WoW). The competition is a series of themed, spectacular catwalk shows featuring highly original costumes and accessories, united by a common concept, coupled with choreography, sound, lighting and special effects. The event features local and international artists and designers.

Since 1993, a new Pacific section has been operating here, later called "Oceania", which includes a category of "wearable art". The street fashion show is part of a community festival, established as an attempt to express the political views of the radical part of the population on the state of affairs in the Pacific. From this, a separate event "Style Pasifika" (Style Pasifika) developed, which focused less on wearable art and more on Pacific creative fashion styles and body art.

In 1998, the Australian town of Broome began hosting an annual entertainment event featuring wearable art pieces made from a variety of materials.

In 2002, the Port Moody Art Centre Society in British Columbia held its first annual Wearable Art Awards, and that same year, the annual Fashion Fantasia awards were presented in Sandy Bay, Tasmania, Australia, celebrating the body as a canvas for the most unusual and original garments. 

Criticism

Some art experts believe that fashion is not art. Behind all the provocativeness with which the outfits are created and the fashion shows are staged, there is a greed and a desire to provoke. Fashion depends on fine art, photography and cinema for its visual references. To support each of the many collections created each year, it exploits these images so mercilessly that their themes quickly lose their meaning. 

Overall, the term "wearable art" has acquired pejorative associations, and the concept itself has fallen out of fashion. It is considered populist and is often associated with local art events and promotions. However, many small businesses are still selling such personalized, art-inspired clothing and jewelry online. 

Sourced from Wikipedia