In 1913 Sonia Delaunay made a dress out of blocks and arcs of velvet and silk in contrasting colours and wore it out in Paris. She called it a robe simultanée. Two years earlier she had made a patchwork bedspread in the same way, and the colour theory she and Robert Delaunay were working through in paint went into the cloth without being watered down on the way.
In short · 4 min read
- Sonia Delaunay carried her painting into dresses in 1913.
- Keith Haring's Pop Shop put his drawings on T-shirts from 1986.
- A photograph on a wall and on cloth are two different relationships with one image.
The part that still surprises people is that she did not treat any of this as a lesser activity than painting. She ran a workshop producing the work. She sold it. In 1927 she published a book on the influence of painting on fashion, having spent years demonstrating that the traffic ran in both directions. Pure colour in waves, triangles, concentric circles and rhombs, laid out on a body that moved, which is a harder surface to compose for than a rectangle that stays still.
Seventy years later Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop at 292 Lafayette Street in New York. It sold T-shirts and badges and posters carrying his drawings, along with work by Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol. A Tokyo branch followed in 1987 and lasted about a year. The New York shop stayed open until September 2005, long after Haring himself had died.
His explanations for it are worth reading closely. The Pop Shop makes my work accessible. It's about participation on a big level. He wanted the same range of people who had seen his subway drawings, including, in his words, kids from the Bronx. Elsewhere he wrote that commercial projects had let him reach millions of people he would never have reached as an unknown artist. Those sentences have the cadence of somebody answering a question he had been asked a great many times, by people who did not much like the answer.
A worn garment records the wearing.
The objection is old and it is not stupid. If the same drawing hangs in a gallery and sits on a cheap shirt, something has happened to it. Scarcity is part of how the art market assigns value, and a thing that anyone can have is worth less within that system by definition. Whether it is worth less as art is a different question, and the two get run together constantly.
What actually changes when an image moves onto a garment is more specific than cheapening. The audience changes first. A picture on a wall is seen by whoever comes into the room, which is a small and mostly self selecting group. A picture on a coat is seen by everybody the wearer walks past, none of whom chose to look at it. That is a genuinely different distribution, and it was clearly the part Haring cared about.
The relationship changes too. You do not visit a shirt. You put it on, and it creases, and it fades, and eventually it goes soft and thin at the shoulders. An owned painting stays in the condition it was bought in, if you are careful. A worn garment records the wearing. After a few years it carries some of your own history alongside whatever the artist put on it.
They are two different relationships with one photograph, and most people who like an image want both at different times.
Something is genuinely lost, and it is worth naming rather than arguing away. Scale goes. A photograph printed at sixty by eighty centimetres can be stood in front of and looked into for a long time, and detail rewards that. Nobody looks at their own chest for ten minutes. A garment gives an image glances, from other people, at conversational distance, mostly sideways. Some images survive that treatment and some are hollowed out by it.
Which is a reason to do both rather than choose. The Photo Art exists as a print you stand in front of, where the detail and the scale still mean something, and it exists on cloth so the same image can leave the room and go about the day. They are not competing versions of the same object. They are two different relationships with one photograph, and most people who like an image want both at different times. The framed prints and the garments carry the same work and ask for completely different amounts of attention.
Delaunay's dresses are in museum collections now, laid flat in climate controlled drawers, which is close to the opposite of what they were made for. The Pop Shop shut in 2005 and its shirts are collected and resold. The argument about whether art belongs on a wall or on a body has never been settled, and it gets run again roughly once a generation, usually by people who have not noticed that the last round ended in a draw.
A quiet extension of this idea
Our pieces are built around this principle. A single word, placed so it naturally comes back into your attention during the day. Not something you have to focus on the whole day, just something that stays with you.
