From Rembrandt’s turban to Foscolo’s white shirt, passing through the tailored provocations of Dalí. The exhibition S’Habiller en artists at the Louvre di Lens investigates the link between fashion and creativity. A glamorous and visionary journey that combines history, costume and personality.
There are those who attract artist and those who are seriously. In any case, if it is true that to create a masterpiece it is not enough to wear an extravagant dress, it must be admitted that the eye also wants its part. In an ideal catalog of the types of artist, Ugo Foscolo with the white shirt with the jabot opened on the chest, Rembrandt with the turban while painting in the penumbra, Alessandro Blasetti with the boots while giving orders on the set and Yayoi Kusama, unreachable in polka dot dresses that confuse with the fantasies of his works.
They are real artists dressed as artists. But the series is much more complex. There are ordinary people who love to dress like creatives and there are artists who do not aspire to be identified immediately as such and camouflage themselves, choosing clothes that allow you to get confused between the crowd. Like Gilbert & George, unconventional masters par excellence, who stand out for their sober tailored tweed dresses, but also as Maurizio Cattelan, often in a jacket and tie also in his most revolutionary performances. We are on the opposite of Salvador Dalí’s Acentrism, who already with his mustaches in the position at 10 and 10 told his inimitable character.
He tries to order in a complex matter, the exhibition S’Habiller en Artiste, curated by Annabelle Ténèze, Olivier Gabet, Marie Gord, Audrey Palacin, scheduled until July 21 at the Louvre in Lens, in the north of France, one of the detached offices of the Parisian museum.
The exhibition deals with a whole series of themes related to the look of creatives over the centuries, passing from Balzac’s chamber guise to the simultaneous clothes of Sonia Delaunay, to the iconic wig of Andy Warhol.
On display there are more than 200 works to dissect topics such as the artist in a white shirt, the Bohème, the tuxedo worn by women, taking the move from the Renaissance and arriving today. In the rooms of the museum, an ideal dialogue between clothes, accessories and paintings, sculptures, photographs is established, relating the world of art and that of fashion, highlighting the strength of the dress as an expression of one’s personality.
As Annabelle Ténèze, director of the Louvre-Lens Museum, notes, “the exhibition reveals another way of intertwining the history of fashion and art history, to write a social and artistic history far from frivolity, made of beauty and freedom. In the history of appearances, we also read the history of taste, the rules and the desire to transgress and emancipate themselves ».
Thus a journey in fashion seen through the eyes of the artists is outlined. Some examples? The Marinière, the classic blue and white horizontal striped striped stripes, so loved by Picasso and Andy Warhol, and reported in vogue by Jean-Paul Gaultier.
And then, the aphrodisiac jacket scattered by glasses conceived by Salvador Dalí, the hair ties as the surrealist provocation, the blue mechanical suit worn by Jean Tinguely when he worked at his sculptures, the hats worn by Camille Corot when he painted, a kind of Linus blanket for the large nineteenth -century landscape. Ample space is also dedicated to the androgynous aspect of artists who have chosen the dress as an instrument of emancipation and self -representation.
“The artists live in the clothes,” notes the journalist Sophie Fontanel in the exhibition catalog. “And even the accessories, as shown by the famous photo of Samuel Beckett with a Gucci bag brought with ease as a simple Tote Bag”.
In the exhibition there are no portraits and photographs of the artists at work, seen in their private dimension. The way of dressing, in fact, depends a lot on the context: one account is to imagine a painter in his atelier, with the overalls smeared with colors, or in a more romantic way, with the Basque and the white shirt, and another is to see it in everyday life, where the difference with the others is thinned.
Sometimes a certain type of clothing is a purely functional question. As Alberto Camerini explains, singer who precorated the times playing an unprecedented electronic harlequin between rock and art comedy: «The painter paints dressed in a certain way because otherwise he gets dirty with color. Then when he goes to the gallery for the vernissage, he wears elegant clothes ».
Maybe, however, with clothes that tell the way of being. “Some painters friends of my father dressed in a bizarre way,” continues Camerini. «They were unique, they did not dress with the clothes found in mass shops. It is a creative necessity, it is the joy of playing ».
There is therefore a double value of the artist’s dress, which becomes destabilizing according to the situation: Magritte who paints in a jacket and tie or Charlie Watts, the legendary drummer of the Rolling Stones dressed in a sober and phlegmatic way, have the same strength as Giacomo Balla’s futurist vests or the clothes designed in the courses of the Bauhaus.
“Every our dress is part of an intimate narrative, as well as a collective, economic, social and multicultural story”, note Olivier Gabet and Annabelle Ténèze, curators of the exhibition S’Habiller en artista.
«The appearances, even the deceptive ones, or even more when they are deceptive, are significant. Although this story of artists’ clothing is not free of clichés, from the Bohemien to excentricity, between truth and fiction, the emblematic clothes worn by artists, to work in the studio, to the inaugurations, on the stage or in the social sphere, intertwine a new way of understanding them. The clothes chosen, purchased, found or created by the artists themselves have the value of a human and artistic manifesto. They express the style of an artist, in both senses of the term ».
An affirmation that fits perfectly with the style of Lucio Corsi, a nascent star of the music scene that affects and convinces with its outfits, where pop, vintage and calls to the tradition of rock are mixed. Of course, then, there is the size of the show. When an artist makes a performance he transforms and the dress on stage becomes a second skin, which tells the character. David Bowie’s performances such as Ziggy Stardust are historical. A hymn to the imagination taken up by histrionic characters such as Renato Zero and Achille Lauro.
Everyone lives the character in his own way, considering the dress more or less adherent to his identity. As Camerini explains, “Rockets wear the costume on stage, like Ivan Cattaneo, but with a difference: the Rockets want to represent the astronaut, while Ivan is the astronaut. My inspiration, on the other hand, is the character of Arlecchino, who is the maximum realization of the artist’s costume “.
