Fashion Design and Art: Between Mutual Voracity and Disciplinary Self-Determination

Abstract

Observing the 20th century, it becomes clear how much the definition of fashion as an inferior reflection of art is definitively outdated, in favour of a more complex and equitable relationship of mutualistic inference that places fashion within the ranks of the arts of modernity. Fashion has always utilised art in its rhetoric and draws on an innumerable series of expressions and idioms, contending with art for the esteem and social prominence accorded to high culture. The granted and denied relationship with time appears central in the definition of similarities and differences, essential to understanding mutual inferences and distinctive qualities in today’s increasingly complex and nuanced picture. While fashion constantly seeks (otherwise risking its very existence) a vector of engagement with the real experience of the public and with time (“con-tempo-raneo”), art lives on visionary paradoxes, on a higher spiritual need, translated into form.