“Fashion is not art,” Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garçons told an interviewer in 2015. “The aims of fashion and art are different and there is no need to compare them.” Easy to say, but when Australia’s biggest and most successful art museum devotes its summer blockbuster to two revolutionary fashion designers, all definitions fail. From what we see in Westwood/Kawakubo, it would be easier to classify many of Kawakubo’s designs as ‘sculpture’, rather than items of clothing.
In the same interview she went on to say, “Clothes are only completed when somebody actually wears them,” which is right in line with so-called “contextual” theories of art - being the claim that something becomes art when exhibited in a context that identifies it as such. Duchamp’s porcelain urinal of 1917, Fountain, is the texbook example, because few would pause to admire its aesthetic values if encountered in a public lavatory.
By this definition, when clothes are exhibited on plinths and platforms in an art gallery, we can see them as “art”, but when they are being worn it’s much easier to call them “fashion”. If we need to resolve this dilemma we might do best to take our cue from Vivienne Westwood, who once said: “The only thing I really do believe in is culture.”