Fashion Supporting Art
Category: Art & Architecture
The world of art and the industry of fashion overlap in many ways. Both are about exploring aesthetics in new and creative ways, pushing boundaries and challenging conventions. They are also fundamentally different. Fashion is a form of design and is thus shaped as a solution to a problem. Jackets have pockets to hold our wallets and keys, shoes have strong soles to support out bodies, and shirts have holes for our head and our arms. Art lacks these restrictions; it is free and can take any shape or form it desires.
“Fashion is art’s little sister, with more money but less cultural capital”, an art historian once summarised the fraught relationship between fashion and art. Perhaps she was right, though the relationship is more nuanced and complex than that. Many 19th century artworks, painted in oil, show the detailed brush strokes outlining details in a skirt or stitches in a hemline, and in contemporary art, textiles have been an important material in creating large, transient sculptures, like the ones carried out. by Christo. But in one way, the art historian was correct: globally speaking, there is more money in fashion, as everyone needs to buy clothes but not everyone feels that art is equally important. Through clothes, fashion is utilitarian while art speaks to the imagination, as a form of aesthetics without purpose. Fashion has what art lacks: money, while art has in abundance what fashion wants, namely credibility. To solve this, in recent years several art foundations have been created, either by luxury brands or by powerful individuals in fashion’s elite, hoping that these collaborations will bring the two expressions closer together.
Fondazione Prada, Milan
Miuccia Prada inherited the family business when no one else was interested. With a PhD in political science and training in the art of pantomime, it was not evident that she would enter the world of bags and accessories. By applying her own ideas, she transformed the company, while developing it into one of the world’s most cutting-edge fashion brands. Ever since, Prada has been a favourite among intellectuals and the creative class.
An avid art collector, Miuccia Prada had a vision of combining her interest in art with her work in fashion. Fondazione Prada was established in 1993, and in the past twenty years, it has promoted a wide cultural programme, including film festivals, philosophical talks, and architectural projects.
In 2011, Fondazione Prada opened a new exhibition space in Venice. In 2015 its permanent Milan venue was unveiled, in Largo Isarco, just south of the city. Conceived by OMA (led by Rem Koolhaas), the space combines several architectural typologies, thus providing a varied platform for temporary art exhibitions, as well as the showcasing of some of their permanent art works.
Formerly a distillery dating back to the 1910s, three new building structures (named “Podium”, “Cinema” and “Torre”) have been added to the complex. The most iconic of the buildings is the “Haunted House”, a 4-storey building clad in 24 carat gold foil, where pieces from the permanent art collection are on display.
The museum café, Bar Luce, is designed by Wes Anderson to emulate a typical Milanese coffeeshop. The range of colours, Formica furniture, and wood panels are reminiscent of the Italian style of the 1950s, while the arched ceiling is a subtle allusion to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.
For those wanting something more substantial to eat, Restaurant Torre is located on the sixth floor of the compound’s tower and was designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2018. It is divided into two parts, restaurant and bar, both characterised by large floor-to-ceiling windows and decorated with Eero Saarinen furniture. On the restaurant’s third level, you will find original furnishings from New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant, designed by Philip Johnson in 1958.
Among the artists represented you will find Carsten Høller, Jeff Koons, John Wesley, and John Baldessari. There is also a triangular outdoor terrace, overlooking the silhouette of Milan.
This site has become one of the most significant places for contemporary art in Milan, an inspiration for anyone interested in art – or fashion, for that matter.
Pinault Collection, Paris
The Pinault Collection in Paris is housed in the circular building Bourse de Commerce, its vast space the perfect exhibition site for contemporary artworks. The collection shares name with its founder François Pinault, who before this also founded luxury conglomerate Kering (which owns Gucci, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, to name a few). The Paris site is the fourth owned by the Pinault Collection but only the first outside Venice.
The building has a fascinating history, originally used as a place to negotiate the trade of grain and other similar commodities. It has its origin in a circular wheat exchange building, originally constructed in the 1760s, with an open-air court that was later capped by a wooden dome (and replaced in 1811 with a copper one). The dome constituted a major innovation in industrial architecture. The architects ordered an extraordinarily large panorama from artist Alexis Joseph Mazerolle, to decorate the base of the glass roof. Mazerolle worked with several other artists to portray trade on a world-wide scale on 14,000 square metres of canvas marouflage.
The building itself was planned by Nicolas Le Camus de Mêzières and his most famous for its double helix staircase. Together with the 25 arcades on the inner façade, this staircase is the only remaining vestige of the former 18th century Halle au bié. Corn was stored on two levels, a ground floor, and a granary to which the double helix staircase led. The two ramps, which intertwine in two distinct helixes, allowed the porters who went up and down with the voluminous sacks of corn to avoid crossing each other.
At the heart of the rotonde, a concrete cylinder, 9 metres high and 10 metres in diameter, fits into the central void. The minimalist structure affirms a unique, abstract space, conducive to the display of contemporary artworks. The Japanese architect Tadao Ando is the author of this strong architectural gesture, whose form echoes the circular shape of the Pantheon in Rome.
The transformation of the building into a contemporary art centre cost over 100 million euros.
The museum hosts around ten exhibitions per year, and works in coordination with its Venetian sister museums, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. When entering the space, one is first struck by the vastness of its interiors, as well as how delicately the dialogue between past and present has been carried out through the renovations.
The history of the building is possible to trace in the old staircase and the cylinder-shaped main exhibition space.
At the top is a restaurant with views of the neighbouring buildings; a place to pause and reflect on both the art and the industrial architecture of this place.
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
In 2014, one of the most spectacular of Paris art museums opened its doors to the public for the first time. Fondation Louis Vuitton is a non-profit entity of the LVMH group, known for its spectacular architecture as well as its artistic content. Working in the tradition of Deconstruction, Frank Gehry found inspiration in the glass ceilings of the Grand Palais, as well as the Palmarium, built for the Jardin d'Acclimatation in 1893, but turned this inspiration into fragments, put together in radically new ways for the Louis Vuitton museum project.
The two-story structure has eleven galleries of different sizes, a voluminous 350-seat auditorium and multilevel roof terraces for events and art installations. The resulting glass building takes the form of a sailboat’s sails inflated by the wind. These glass sails envelop the “iceberg”, a series of shapes with white, flowery terraces.
There was a practical reason for the construction. Previously, there was a bowling alley on this site, and Gehry was forbidden from designing anything larger than the old building. Anything that was higher or wider than that, had to be made of glass.
More than 400 people were involved in the creative process, and the construction took many years to complete. It was not easy for LMVH to create a new landmark in a town as conservative as Paris, especially as one of the city’s trademarks is its low skyline, accentuated today only by the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur. The art centre is however not visible from the rest of the city, hidden in the greenery of the vast park Bois de Boulogne in the outskirts of Paris.
Visiting the museum requires some planning, as the queues tend to be long, and so booking a time for entry is advisable. Also, the building is at its most stunning when seen in the sunlight, when the sun is reflected in the curved glass of the “sails”.
Don’t miss the art installation in the outside area of the ground floor, by artist Olafur Eliasson, a subtle interplay between shadows, light, water, and stone.
After 55 years, the agreement is that the museum will be donated to the city of Paris.
