Fashion entertains a wide variety of pretensions - not the least of them a desire to be considered art of the highest order. Efforts to bring the promotion of this suit to a triumphal conclusion have been maintained throughout the present century, growing in intensity as it draws to a close.
A tranche of publications and exhibitions over the past three years were all dedicated precisely to pressing fashion's artistic claims, beginning with the Art and Fashion theme at 1996's Florence Biennale. Last winter there were exhibitions on the subject of Fashion and Cubism at the Costume Institute of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art and Fashion at the Hayward Gallery in London. In addition, 18 months ago Milan hosted an art/ fashion show co-ordinated by Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani and based around the theme of black (fashion's favourite colour throughout the 1990s) while Paris's Fondation Cartier handed over its space in autumn 1998 to Japanese designer Issey Miyake.
As if the argument were not already well delivered, next month CPD, the world's biggest clothing trade fair in Dusseldorf, is to include no less than three exhibitions based on the same theme, fashion and art.
All these events have faced the same challenge: to present fashion in a manner which gives credibility to the notion that this is a branch of creative art as worthy of serious scrutiny as any other. All failed to realise their ambition because they overlooked the fact that commerce more than creativity lies at the heart of fashion.
The past 150 years have been marked by clothes designers efforts to raise their status, and other art forms have been pressed into service whenever possible. The first acknowledged couturier (as opposed to dress maker) was Charles Worth, whose work for the French Imperial court and particularly its Empress Eugenie during the 1860s was disseminated throughout Europe thanks to the paintings of Franz Winterhalter. From Worth's point of view, these pictures might almost be regarded as an early and advantageous form of advertising, another branch of commercial creativity which would later lure many other visual artists. What consistently emerges from even a cursory study of the links between fashion promotion and art is that representatives of the latter tend to have a strong sense of self-marketing - rather like the fashion designers they are assisting.
It is surely no accident that the 20th century's most commercially-minded artist, Andy Warhol, should have begun his career in the late 1940s as an illustrator for New York fashion magazines such as Glamour and Harper's Bazaar. The lessons he learnt during that period about the importance of meeting the market's demands were later applied to his own art.
In his introduction to the catalogue accompanying Addressing the Century, Peter Wollen makes a plea for fashion's cultural gravitas, noting that "the design and making of garments has traditionally been viewed as artisanal rather than artistic . . . its status, however, has continued to rise during the last 200 years." But Wollen fails to note that this rise in status has only occurred in particularly affluent societies where minor branches of the plastic arts can be esteemed. Elsewhere in the world, clothing retains its inherent character which is primarily functional and only secondarily decorative. In Europe and the US, for example, second-hand garments may now be sold as antiques by established auction houses but this should not necessarily mean they enjoy parity of regard with other items such as paintings and furniture, also offered on the market by the same establishments.
Wollen further remarks that "painters as great as Cezanne and Monet drew on fashion magazines for their imagery" but again, this merely reflects a particular society's leisure interests and can hardly be considered a serious argument in favour of fashion as art.
There have, of course, been many occasions during this century when art and fashion enjoyed a particularly close association. During the early decades, a number of art movements - mostly notably Futurism in Italy, Vorticism in Britain and Constructivism in Russia - showed an interest in clothing design. These tended, however, to take the form of uniforms reminiscent of those devised by Jacques-Louis David in post-revolutionary France. The concern in every instance was not with fashion as a creative form but with ridding clothes of their social and cultural implications.
In Italy, for example, Ernesto Thayaht produced and promoted a unisex overall which he called the Tuta, derived from the word tutta, meaning "all". Fashion's constant striving for the novel - based on a commercial necessity to sell fresh product to its clients every season - is the very antithesis of the Tuta or the clothes created by Rodchenko and his fellow Constructivists.
More oblique and pervasive links between fashion and art this century include the role of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in helping to redefine how women dressed before the first World War. The most important couturier of the period, Paul Poiret, based many of his designs on the clothes produced for ballet dancers by Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois; these were distinguished by their ability to permit free movement in contrast to the restrictions which had defined late 19th-century women's fashion. Poiret employed a number of artists, including Dufy and Derain, to create fabric designs for him; perhaps inevitably, the most successful work came from painters whose work contained the strongest decorative element. Similarly, around the same time in Italy, Mariano Fortuny - whose Delphos dress epitomises fashion's first stirrings of interest in feminism - was greatly influenced by his friendships with writer Gabriele D'Annunzio and actress Eleanora Duse. Later, the connections between fashion and ballet were to become overt when, in 1922, Chanel created the costumes for the Ballets Russes' Le Train Bleu, with music commissioned from Darius Milhaud; around the same time, she also costumed a contemporary production of Sophocles's Antig- one re-written by Jean Cocteau. Chanel's clothing, both on and off-stage, continued the move initiated by Poiret towards greater ease and freedom. For her own collections and for Le Train Bleu she used jersey, a fabric which was then the very essence of modernity and in its daring might be considered fashion's equivalent of Cubism, especially since Chanel was a friend of Picasso and other painters at the time.
But the ongoing divide between fashion and art is illustrated by another, less happy, instance from the same period. In 1925, Man Ray was commissioned by Vogue to photograph for the magazine a sequence of couture-clad mannequins at the Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. These were due to appear in the August issue but before that date, the photographer allowed one picture to appear on the cover of the periodical La Revolution Surrealiste accompanied by the slogan "et guerre au travail" ("and war on work"). Ray's Vogue cover was immediately pulled because this act of cultural subversion undermined fashion's commercial character. Fashion literally cannot afford to be ironic, much less anarchic, because of the potential threat this poses to sales.
Nonetheless, the most effective link between art and fashion to-date was during the 1930s when the designer Elsa Schiaparelli joined forces with a number of Surrealists, particularly Salvador Dali. Might not this be because the Surrealists's greatest interest and abilities tended to lie in the area of self-promotion and many of them, not least Dali, were strongly motivated by the possibility of making money from their work? Schiaparelli's clothes are conservative in essence and surrealist only in their decorative detail - a piece of witty trompe l'oeil beading on a jacket, for example, or a hat in the form of a vegetable or item of household furniture.
Many surrealist motifs resurfaced in New York fashion circles during the 1950s, when they were employed with particular success by window dressers such as Gene Moore and Tom Lee at Tiffany's and Bonwit Teller. And the same elements regularly featured in fashion photography of the period because many of those who worked for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar - especially Horst P. Horst and Erwin Blumenfeld - spent the pre-war years in Paris where they had known many members of the Surrealist movement.
Fashion photography probably remains the field with the highest claim to artistic credentials. Traditionally, the primary purpose of such photography has been to sell the clothes featured. However, in many contemporary style magazines (everything from Sleaze Nation to Attitude) the clothes are intensely pedestrian. Unable to be creative with such basics as sweatshirts, jeans or trainers, photographers such as Jurgen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans have produced fashion shoots in which the clothes are incidental. These pictures, reflecting the world in which T-shirt consumers live, seem as much at home in a gallery as in the advertising pages of a style magazine.
Otherwise, the distance between fashion and art remains as great as ever. There continue to be designers who cannibalise art history for inspiration, whether Yves Saint Laurent with his Mondrian couture dresses for winter 1965 or Gianni Versace, whose silk evening dresses for spring/summer 1991 were printed with Andy Warhol's polychrome portraits of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.
Other designers are less obvious about their borrowings, but these nonetheless eventually become evident: in the present decade, both Georgina Godley and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons have made clothes with distorted and padded sections which owe a strong debt to Oskar Schlemmer's designs for the Bauhaus in the late 1920s. Fashion may continue to aspire to art, especially in its presentation over recent years, but because it can never ignore the market's opinion it must remain artistically flawed. The aspiration is unrealisable but the efforts to prove otherwise can often be highly entertaining.
