The Art of Fashion

Since the emergence of the seasonal fashion industry in the nineteenth century, Western artists have been engaging with fashion’s impact, meaning and forms in their artwork. In portraits, the clothes that sitters wear are often revelatory about their wider context or identity.

But as time has passed, sartorial details artists used to provide visual praise or condemnation of their subjects have lost their legibility. Exploring the variety of ways in which artists have engaged with such possibilities over the last two hundred years, this book examines the intricate relationship between the history of modern art and fashion, revealing the many ways modern fashion has featured within art and the ways art has, in fact, become fashion. Discover the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the creation of the London department store Liberty; the free advertising Burberry received in paintings of the First World War, and how London’s ‘Swinging Sixties’ scene led to the creation of some of the most important and powerful artworks of the twentieth century.