Exhibitions 2
Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting (National Gallery, till 8 September)
Dress to impress
Laura Gascoigne
When John Galliano called haute couture 'a workshop for dreams', he wasn't the first to draw a parallel between fashion and art. In the past 20 years, since Artforum put Issey Miyake on its cover, the line between the two has become so blurred that members of both professions are no longer sure which side they stand on. While textile artists such as Caroline Broadhead create garments for exhibition and conceptual artists like Vanessa Beecroft mount catwalk shows, dress designers have been going the other way: Hussein Chalayan has turned his fashion shows into art performances and Helen Storey has been having gallery exhibitions. Not to be left behind, the Guggenheim has given Armani a retrospective and the Pompidou Centre hosted Yves Saint Laurent's farewell show.
It's a good moment for the National Gallery's new exhibition Fabric of Vision, examining the role of dress and drapery in art. Spanning half a millennium from the Renaissance to the 20th century with some 70 pictures, two-thirds of them loans, it ought to offer fascinating insights into painting by making us look at the bits of pictures we normally miss. But its curator, the art and fashion historian Anne Hollander, is less interested in picture-making than in the use of drapery 'to express emotion and create drama', a psycho-sartorial approach that sweeps her splendidly through four centuries, only to leave her rather flat in the last.
She opens with a teaser — four pairs of paintings from four centuries showing how fashion has shaped the ideal naked body — but the exhibition proper begins in Room 2 with the Renaissance's rediscovery of the naturalism of classical drapery. For painters like van der Weyden and Mantegna, emulating nature in drapery that 'draped' was excitement enough. But the thrill of naturalism for its own sake soon faded. The law of gravity began to appear restrictive: art history unveiled the wind machine, and drapery stirred into independent life.
Already in Tintoretto's 'St George and the Dragon' (1560), a capricious breeze sends the fleeing princess's wrap swirling around her in an arc as stylised as the visual echoes in a cartoon. By Daumier's 'Nymphs pursued by Satyrs' (1850), the blast is so strong you can't tell if it's blowing their few clothes off or holding them on. Meanwhile the studio stylists have got to work on drapery's potential for revelation, from the violent disclosure of Johann Liss's 'Judith in the Tent of Holofernes' (mid-1620s) — where trickles of blood mingle with torrents of silk — to the all but indecent exposure of Fragonard's 'A Young Girl on her Bed making her Dog Dance' (1770). There's a brief lull as neoclassicism reasserts the twin laws of propriety and gravity, then the party gets back into full swing as the Victorian era celebrates the thrills of frills in paintings such as Tissot's 'The Ball' (1878), showing the artist's mistress overdressed to perfection with a dim elderly sugar daddy in tow.
It's the last gasp of excess before modern clean-cut chic — the triumph of form over substance — slices the icing off the sartorial cake. For devotees of drapery, this is a sad loss. As this show reminds us, in the hands of the greatest painters drapery is not just about drama and revelation, but about warmth, protection and tender associations expressed through infinite subtleties of texture, colour and line. Here's where quiet artists like Corot and Bonnard come into their own. Bonnard gets more emotional mileage from his eloquent treatment of the red-fringed yellow bath rug between the tiptoes of his 'Standing Nude' (1920) than could be extracted from acres of dramatically exposed flesh.
This is a fascinating exhibition, but there's one thread missing: the role of drapery in abstract composition. It leads straight from El Greco's 'Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple' (1600) through Fragonard's 'Psyche showing her Sisters her Gifts from Cupid' (1753) to Delaunay's 'A Woman with a Parasol' (1913) in the final room. Without it, we can't get from there to here. Emotion and drama take us only so far; they don't prepare us for the shock of modern art ironing all the sensuality out of fabric and cutting it sharply down to size: pure form and colour.
Art's loss has been fashion's gain; in our own era control of the dream factory has passed to the dress designer. The true heir to the zipless magic of the Rococo is Julien Macdonald, notorious designer of 'that dress' in all its flimsy film-premiere manifestations, who with the aid of modern fastenings can make even Daumier's nymphet dreams a reality. The difference is, the new dream is fleeting — it won't stick like paint. Macdonald has no illusions about that: 'It's not art, it's a dress,' he says firmly. 'It's a dress that you wear out. You go out, you have a couple of drinks . .. and then you take the dress off and you throw it on the floor.'
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