{"id":442,"date":"2026-11-04T12:42:04","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rafaelhett.com\/?p=442"},"modified":"2026-11-04T12:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T17:46:09","slug":"is-fashion-art-and-why-the-question-persists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelhett.com\/fr\/is-fashion-art-and-why-the-question-persists\/","title":{"rendered":"Is fashion art? (and why the question persists)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In December 2006, a black Givenchy dress sold at Christie’s in London for \u00a3467,200. Audrey Hepburn had worn it in the opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s<\/em>. The price was the price of a painting, and the press covered the sale the way it covers paintings. Yet few people would say the dress had become a work of art. It had become a relic, which is something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question “is fashion art?” comes back every few years, usually with a blockbuster exhibition or a famous auction. It never seems to get settled. My suspicion is that it persists not because it is hard but because it is badly posed. It looks like a question about objects: is this dress as good, as meaningful, as serious<\/em> as a painting? Really, it is a question about the economy of prestige around objects. Who is allowed to call something art, and what do they gain by doing so?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A short history of a demotion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“Art” has never been a stable category. In antiquity, rhetoric was an art, and philosophers wrote treatises on it. Today, nobody would hang a good speech in a museum. The line that matters for fashion was drawn between the liberal arts, which belonged to the mind, and the mechanical arts, which belonged to the hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Renaissance sharpened that line. Painters and sculptors began to sign their work, set their own prices and cultivate the figure of the genius. They left the weavers, joiners and potters behind. Tailors and dressmakers stayed on the wrong side. Rose Bertin dressed Marie Antoinette and was mockingly called the “minister of fashion”. She shaped European taste as much as any painter of her century, yet art history files her under trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, men gave up ornament. The psychologist J. C. Fl\u00fcgel later called this the “Great Masculine Renunciation”. Sober dark cloth became the uniform of the serious, productive bourgeois man. The whole realm of appearances was handed over to women and, with it, a reputation for vanity, excess and frivolous spending. Thorstein Veblen would describe this spending as conspicuous consumption<\/em> (and he had wives’ wardrobes in mind). Fashion’s low rank was never only about craft. It was also about gender and money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The designer signs his name<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The nineteenth century gave fashion its first claim to authorship. Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman in Paris, reversed the old relation between client and maker. Before him, wealthy clients told dressmakers what to make. Worth proposed collections of his own design, made clients come to his salon, showed clothes on living models and sewed his name into the garments. The label is a signature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Evening dress<\/a> (ca. 1882), House of Worth<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Credit: Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of the Princess Viggo in accordance with the wishes of the Misses Hewitt, 1931<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The couturiers who followed, from Vionnet and Chanel to Balenciaga and Dior, became authors in the full sense. They had houses, styles, followers and a place at the tables of the people they dressed. Fashion was also, unmistakably, an industry. Colbert had supposedly said, two centuries earlier, that fashion was to France what the gold mines of Peru were to Spain. It is still one of the country’s great exports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the knot. Worth won the signature but not the aura. To see why, we need to look at how art manages its own relationship with money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What art knows how to deny<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote about both haute couture<\/em> and the art market, gives the clearest answer I know. The art world, he argued, rests on a\u00a0collective denial<\/em>\u00a0of commercial interest. Everyone involved knows that works are bought and sold. But the field is organized so that the commerce never appears as the point. Prestige comes first, and money follows as if by accident. Bourdieu describes the dealer as a kind of “cultural banker”. The artist, meanwhile, is kept at a distance from “business”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fashion has never been able to perform this denial convincingly, for three reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n