Viktor & Rolf, dresses from the spring/summer 2016 haute couture catwalk collection, Paris
Only suitable for the catwalk
Picasso and contemporary fashion
Over the years there has been a growing trend in the haute couture industry for fashion shows to present designs that defy the limits of wearability. Such collections are often not intended to be sold but rather to attract potential customers’ attention to the ‘brand’. Fashion, like any other form of creative expression, is evolving rapidly today, and its experimental drive has turned it into an artistic field that is undoubtedly comparable to that the visual arts, with a constant flow of influences and effects between the two disciplines.
The times when Picasso’s first wife, Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, dressed in Coco Chanel have changed, and over the years a fair number of prestigious maisons have borrowed shapes and gestures from Picasso’s rich repertoire for their collections. Take, for example, French couturier Yves Saint Laurent in his 1979 and 1989 collections. Dominican fashion designer Óscar de la Renta likewise paid tribute to Picasso’s Cubist period in 2012, and other present-day creators such as American Tory Burch, inspired by the painter’s partner Françoise Gilot, and Brazilian footwear designer Charlotte Olympia are among those who have recently included references to Picasso’s universe in their clothing or accessories.
Cubist polo dresses
In 2016 Dutch fashion design duo Viktor & Rolf recalled Picasso’s papiers collés and the angular faces of his female portraits. In their collection – significantly entitled The Performance of Sculptures – they started with a simple white tennis dress and adapted it with progressively more complex alterations. The volumes jutted outwards, spiralled, swirled and were projected into space to the point of completely concealing the models, who were engulfed by towering Cubist polo dresses.
In some of their designs they appropriated the distorted faces of Dora Maar; in others they invited viewers to conjure up visions of Françoise Gillot. The result became a markedly sculptural exercise which, besides using visual references, stemmed from a conceptual approach that explored the meaning of space and the boundaries between the second and third dimensions.
The model as a canvas
Perhaps the Picasso-inspired collection that has attracted the most media attention in recent years is that of Italian fashion house Moschino. In 2020 the Italian firm’s creative director Jeremy Scott presented harlequins, guitars and mandolins – colours and designs whose inspiration was the result of a formal exploration of what is known as Synthetic Cubism. It was as though the women depicted in the painter’s canvases were parading down the catwalk, articulating a sort of spatial jigsaw puzzle. Whereas Cubist paintings represent the three-dimensional fragmentation of space into two dimensions, in Scott’s show space was flattened into a pictorial two-dimensional appearance. Scott treated the models as canvases and the dresses as sculptures.
There was much talk in the specialised press about this collection and Scott’s intentions in drawing inspiration from Picasso’s work. In any case, going beyond the literal reference to inspiration, the designs displayed lots of personality: from an artistic point of view, they played with space and the dimension of the body and did so in their own context, that of the catwalk and fashion.
