CHRISTINE WÜRFEL-STAUSS: It does not feel like a transition between two separate worlds to me. I would rather describe it as a continuous dialogue that unfolds differently depending on the context. Art and fashion essentially address very similar questions, even if they both operate under different circumstances. Both explore how people relate to the world they live in, how individuals express their place within our era and how creative design reacts to its time. What differs, however, are the conditions under which they operate – and with them the range of what they can do.

It must also function within everyday life and social contexts while remaining bound to economic factors. So they are not two separate worlds, but art is far less constrained than fashion.

CWS: For me, fashion is all of this at once. Fashion is foremost a form of personal expression, how to dress is a decision that is part of your own identity. It can align with your own values and references, it can also function as powerful tool to take on different roles. Ideally, it can give the wearer the feeling of facing the world in the best possible way within a given context. This is particularly interesting because fashion is one aspect of who you are that always remains visible to others in social spaces. 

Fashion is also significant as a source of inspiration, since during its creation a variety of design principles such as color, proportions, rhythm, and materiality are being applied. These are often elements that have their origins in artistic or architectural ways of thinking. When you recognize aspects of those visual structures in fashion, it often brings their origins back to mind. And also each day, everyone subconsciously makes so many decisions that have a creative component which mirror the sartorial trends around us. Observing the current developments in fashion from runway collections to the way individuals dress in certain contexts influences your own approach and the ability to interpret situations in a certain way through observing sartorial choices. 

And collectability – yes, but only in specific cases. It certainly applies to couture, which often can be considered a work of art. This is partly because it is unique and created only once, and partly because of the technical precision and the immense effort involved. Furthermore, it is rooted in clear conceptual thinking, which brings fashion and art very close together. Another aspect to think of in terms of collectability is your own personal wardrobe. It is one of the most precious collections of our memories. An archive of lived moments of our life that embodies time as almost no other personal collection does. Our clothes contributed to how we felt and how we were perceived by others in certain moments. They can be a diary of happy moments or special situations. I often still know exactly what I was wearing when something significant happened and I cherish those pieces.

CWS: Yes, sometimes I cannnot recall who was there or exactly where it was, but I still remember exactly what I was wearing. Preserving these garments is part of keeping these memories alive. These pieces are irreplaceable, not even by an identical item. They are a collection of personal treasures, invaluable, at least that is what I think. 

Something else that needs to be mentioned in the context of collectability are key pieces of vintage fashion that serve as a sentinel of the sartorial culture of their time. Collecting such pieces preserves the design languages and the cultural attitudes of specific eras. It tells of social ideals and also of technical possibilities. I cherish that because it is a cultural memory in the form of a garment. A beautiful example was the exhibition Gabrielle Chanel – Fashion Manifesto which was first shown at the Palais Galliera in Paris till 2021 and then traveled to Melbourne and London till recently. It traced, through garments such as swimwear and daywear, how shifts in silhouettes and material reflected a broader change in the perception of women and showed how fashion can articulate changing roles within a cultural context.

CWS: When it comes to couture, I think less about practicability than the incredible skill set and abundance of hours of elaborate work that went into the creation. I am always in awe at the highly specialized craftsmanship that is required and that only very few artisans still master today. The level of skill going into the creation of those collections is beyond impressive. I just recently came across a piece in The New Yorker about an atelier in Paris that creates just the featherwork for couture pieces. The techniques involved are so specific and complicated that they are the only atelier remaining that can process these feathers in these ways using techniques refined over decades. When hundreds of hours of work go into the smallest piece of embroidery, it is simply magnificent. But couture collections and their presentations are usually very special cultural moments for several reasons. A few weeks back, I attended the first couture defile by Matthieu Blazy for Chanel at the Grand Palais, which I found absolutely spectacular. As soon as you arrived you walked into a world of its own, a surreal, pink fantasy forest. It was resembled an immersive artwork an many ways. The entire Grand Palais was covered in a light pink, fluffy carpet: a very delicate, powdery pink. Even the seating was all covered in it. And then there were giant mushrooms, up to five meters high. Added to that were weeping willows hanging down, all in orange, pink, and yellow. It was massive, and on top of that, there was birdsong; it was breathtaking to me. An immersive, ephemeral world that was intriguingly beautiful. Just the week before, I had been in Milan at the Fondazione Prada and had seen Carsten Höller’s permanent installation there – an entire room where giant fly agarics hung upside down from the ceiling and rotated. The show in Paris came very close to this work. You experienced a real shift in perception because suddenly everything which usually is of a small size appeared giant; you walk through it and wondered if Alice in Wonderland had felt that way. I had the sensation of suddenly being inside a form of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. When the show began and the collection was presented within this setting while the audience sat right in the middle of it, each guest became part of the whole. For me, the presentation with all its different components clearly belonged in the realm of art.

CWS: For me, fashion approaches art when it moves beyond pure utility and is shaped by a clearly articulated design concept. When fashion is limited to covering or protect the body, it fulfills its central purpose, but it operates in a different category. Art begins where it becomes apparent that every design decision, such as color, cut, and material, is part of a larger conceptual structure. So what matters to me in this context is not only the complexity of a creation or the craftsmanship that went into, but whether a collection or a certain garment is based on a meaningful idea that extends beyond the pieces themselves.

This can even be seen, for example, in pre-modern painting:  clothing functioned as a system of signification. One could often situate the depicted figures within their social and cultural context just through the reading of their attire. Clothing conveyed social position, moral values, and affiliation. This way of reading clothing is still present today, though less clearly defined than in earlier periods.

This distinction between making and an idea that extends beyond the object can be seen in the work of several designers. Some of those whose work I have closely followed or retrospectively studied include Azzedine Alaïa who was a pioneer in approaching clothing from as a sculptural practice, shaping and molding fabric in direct relation to the female body and constructing garments with a level of precision that recalled sculptural practices.

Matthieu Blazy also belongs in this context. A significant part of his work is the way his collections and their presentation through shows and campaigns form a narrative. His garments especially now for Chanel are not shown on their own, but as part of a larger spatial and perceptual setting which shapes how they are perceived. 

Albert Kriemler of Akris takes specific artistic position as a starting point for most of his collections. Rather than just referencing art, he translates distinct visual languages into garments allowing them to exist in new contexts, where they become visible in entirely new contexts beyond the museum context.

CWS: It was a completely organic development. I grew up near Kassel, where the Documenta takes place every five years. At Documenta, I saw an expansive art installation for the very first time in my life, which was such a formative experience for me that it became the starting point for everything that followed. The work was by Rebecca Horn and was installed in an actual school building that had been closed for the summer holidays. Extending across an entire classroom, historical school desks were mounted upside down to the ceiling. From each desk, thick metal wires ran downward, gathered into a bundle, and continued out through the window into the ground outside. Along these wires, liquid ink made its way downward. Even today, I would still find this work striking, but back then as a child, it was beyond anything I had ever encountered. It made me realize just how powerful art can be.

Much later, when it became possible to live with art, I began to experience what that means in everyday life: surrounding oneself with art shapes our thinking, how we relate to ourselves and others and it directs our attention.

Over time, this shifted to something less about my personal space, but about cultural responsibility, about how to contribute to the cultural systems that sustains diverse artistic practices and artistic freedom. Collecting to me today is much less about an individual work that about being supportive in various ways. To help that that independent artistic practices will remain a vital part of society.

CWS: Of course, I remember exactly. It was a work by the Italian artist Turi Simeti, who passed away recently. It is a completely white canvas with wooden ellipses mounted on the back of the canvas, creating slight elevations across the surface. When the work is displayed on the wall, light and shadow shift depending on the surrounding light conditions. Conceptually, the work is rooted in the Zero movement of the 1960s, which was concerned with its focus on reduction, light, space and perception. What drew me to it from the beginning was its calm presence, it radiated a kind of visual quiet. The work still hangs in my home today and it continues to respond to the light and atmosphere in changing ways. That still fascinates me. 

CWS: Fashion has been integral to my thinking from very early on. It fascinated me already as a child, and I enjoyed studying books we had at home about dress making across past centuries as well as international fashion magazines we had at home, I loved playing in my mother’s wardrobe and I would even make things myself. Clothing is part of everyday life and of course you learn quickly that it is an important part of how you feel. But later, I started to pay close attention to what makes certain garments so special as a piece of design – the materials, the levels of craftsmanship, the underlying ideas, whether in terms of design or heritage. This was a different way of looking at it, what it conveys. This awareness only develops over time and is linked to the nature of clothing itself. You live with it, there is no immediate reason to search for deeper layers of meaning. But once you become aware of those some parallels to art can become apparent – in underlying conceptual thinking, precision, techniques, and in how all of these choices shape cultural reality.

With art, aspects as institutional context, art-historical classification, and market value among many others play an immediate role, while with fashion, especially as part of everyday life, there is no such threshold.  

CWS: A true artistic symbiosis with genuine added value exists when both sides can learn from one another and when the collaboration leads to something meaningful that neither could achieve on their own. So the question is what fashion can take from art and what in turn art can learn from fashion. Looking at fashion first, this becomes evident. In art history color, material, and proportions are never neutral, but deliberately used to express something. In historical portrait painting, as we discussed earlier, clothing was never accidental. It communicated character, social status, and much more. This helps fashion to understand how clothing can take on a specific meaning through certain design decisions as for example material and color. The same applies to motifs: in the 1930s, Elsa Schiaparelli created several pieces with Salvador Dalí, including the famous Lobster Dress. In this couture creation, a surrealist symbol, the lobster, was used as an embellishment. This challenged and subverted established codes of femininity and contemporary ideas of evening wear at the time. And vice versa: what is it that that art learn from fashion? In particular the engagement with the human body. Everything fashion does, material, color, structure, is done with the awareness that the result must be wearable and usable in that sense. Fashion always exists within a social context and must function in everyday reality. And it is subject to an entirely different set of constraints than art since it requires continuous renewal. Works of art mostly endure only because of their intellectual or aesthetic significance across eras; fashion, by contrast, must constantly adapt: seasonally, socially, as well as to practical and economic conditions. From this permanent responsiveness of fashion, art could learn how visual languages can change and still retain their relevance.

CWS: I would say that the questions they ask one another are not symmetrical – and that is one of the reasons that makes the dialogue between art and fashion so intriguing . Art might ask fashion how it is still possible today to consistently realize aesthetic concepts without being absorbed by economic constraints. And how one can remain committed to a set of design principles while operating within market logic and being exposed to the demand of constant renewal. What does it mean, from the designer’s perspective, to see one’s work worn and interpreted by others. The wearer may adopt the intended visual language, but not necessarily the values or positions associated with it. 

Conversely, what could fashion ask? Could some forms of art still retreat into mainly aesthetic concepts, allowing its positions to unfold through form, material, and perceptions rather than stating them directly – or do the conditions of the present, shaped by global challenges, require a more direct articulation of where it stands? And, more fundamentally, can a practice that resists such declaration still sustain its relevance today?

CWS: It would definitely be Rebecca Horn. She unfortunately passed away two years ago, but will remains one of the most significant artists of our time. She became known primarily for her performative works as well as her expansive installations and kinetic sculptures. Her work often engages with physicality, perception, power, and structures. In a conversation with her, one of the topics I would love to touch would be her work series called Body Extensions. In these works, she artificially extended parts of the body, arms, legs, even the hands, by attaching feathers, rods, or elongated elements to the fingertips. Through this, she explored the boundaries of the body, intensifying perception and sensitivity; she described this herself as an attempt to make the boundaries of the body more tangible. Today, forms of body modification -artificial nails and other aesthetic interventions – are omnipresent. When Rebecca Horn began working on her series in the 1970s, none of this existed in this form. How would she relate to this phenomenon today? Are there continuities or clear shifts?

She also worked in a distinctly political way and engaged deeply with environmental questions. I would ask her how she assesses the current political and ecological moment, and how she would position herself in relation to that through her work today.

CWS: Likewise! Thank you for your exciting questions!