Uploaded October 2020 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
Writer, editor and arts consultant Alison Kubler examines the complexity of art and fashion’s interrelationship and its effect on visual culture.
Art and fashion’s twenty-first century dalliance has serious economic and cultural repercussions. The global fashion industry has looked to the art world increasingly as a source of inspiration and content. Importantly too, fashion has emerged in the 21st Century as an economic force in its own right. Fashion is given considerable column space in leading financial journals as well as mainstream media. Fashion and art go hand in hand at the big end of town; art collectors wear luxury labels, and fashion houses acquire major artist’s work. It’s a mutual admiration society with economic benefits.
While contemporaneously art and fashion are economic and cultural bed fellows it wasn’t always so. On the face of it, art and fashion are philosophically opposed. Where fashion is understood to be fickle, transient and constantly in flux, art is understood to be more considered, intellectual, even elitist. Art aspires to a cultural longevity that fashion by its very nature seems designed to negate. The natural condition of fashion is to usurp itself, to change and render redundant what has come before. Fashion too has a commercial imperative whereas art, philosophically, does not, although in the 21st century we understand that art and fashion are economic systems in their own right.
Art benefits from the intense gaze directed at fashion and fashion in turn garners the longevity it craves, In short, art needs fashion, and vice versa.
Perspectives: shaping the world through visual culture
Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, ACE Open and Guildhouse.
Writer, editor and arts consultant Alison Kubler examines the complexity of art and fashion’s interrelationship and its effect on visual culture.
Art and fashion’s twenty-first century dalliance has serious economic and cultural repercussions. The global fashion industry has looked to the art world increasingly as a source of inspiration and content. Importantly too, fashion has emerged in the 21st Century as an economic force in its own right. Fashion is given considerable column space in leading financial journals as well as mainstream media. Fashion and art go hand in hand at the big end of town; art collectors wear luxury labels, and fashion houses acquire major artist’s work. It’s a mutual admiration society with economic benefits.
While contemporaneously art and fashion are economic and cultural bed fellows it wasn’t always so. On the face of it, art and fashion are philosophically opposed. Where fashion is understood to be fickle, transient and constantly in flux, art is understood to be more considered, intellectual, even elitist. Art aspires to a cultural longevity that fashion by its very nature seems designed to negate. The natural condition of fashion is to usurp itself, to change and render redundant what has come before. Fashion too has a commercial imperative whereas art, philosophically, does not, although in the 21st century we understand that art and fashion are economic systems in their own right.
Art benefits from the intense gaze directed at fashion and fashion in turn garners the longevity it craves, In short, art needs fashion, and vice versa.
Perspectives: shaping the world through visual culture
Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, ACE Open and Guildhouse.
