Aesthetic Presence

As I am writing the final post for this blog, and trying to sum it up, I am struck by a few things. One, when it comes to discussing art, good visuals are critical, and I believe witnessing the creative process is perhaps more instructive than reading about it. As a result, the sources I chose were initially more “show” than “tell”. The James Jean video he produced for Prada’s collection is a brilliant illustration of the intersection between art and fashion—but it did not give me much to quote or argue with.

Designer John Galliano’s discussion of some of his favorite dresses and their inspirations was right from the horse’s mouth; but again there wasn’t much in the way of controversy there. As I tried to move into more print based resources, I fell into the next hole, which was that current fashion design and academia do not overlap much at all. Most anything written about fashion is written at a safe historical distance of about 50-60 years and falls under costume history, or under the business mechanics of merchandising. So most of the useful sources were not considered credible, and the credible ones were not particularly useful! (Add to that I was accessing the wrong databases, which kept shutting me out, until Allison kindly pointed me in the right direction. For the record, I was using the Library Resources tab right above the Online Databases link because I assumed they went to the same place.) You can see the result in my third post, where the O’Keeffe inspired dress was really what I found interesting, and I added an “official” source oninspiration boards from a library website. (There is a piece from the AtlanticMonthly that I snuck into this post to strengthen it and act as the 3^rd official reference, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is more of an exploratory topic than a controversial one.)

For my fourth post I chose to go with controversy. I found a respectable article written by a legal scholar on the issue of copying designs and how designers can protect their intellectual property rights. Again, because I believe a picture is worth a thousand words, I included a few from an article discussing a current lawsuit alleging Yoko Ono’s new menswear collection is a complete rip off of an unknown designer’s existing collection.

For this last post, I found the Holy Grail—an academic article that actually discusses my topic, albeit in a sideways fashion. This study was designed to examine the inspirations for the design process for a number of design professionals and students in Hong Kong. They found that the main motivator is “aesthetic presence”, though there were other factors that went into the design process as well. They found that fashion has often worked in tandem with current art movements; that the rich visual history of art provides a lot of material from which one can create something new; and that pieces of art often inspired designers on their purely aesthetic merits.

John Galliano talked about that directly when he told the tale of his Venetian inspired collection. Prada used James Jean’s art to both capture a current mood and directly influence the colors and shapes of their collection. The Georgia O’Keeffe inspired dress was a purely aesthetic inspiration. And 80+ year old Yoko One, it would appear, tried to capture a hip mood she could no longer tap into by stealing the designs of someone younger who could, inciting a legal battle in a very grey area of copyright law.

When I started this research I was really curious about the nuts and bolts of how designers worked and what other examples I could find of the links between fine art and their designs. I was really pleased to find the inspiration boards, as I feel like those answer my questions better than any of the articles. In reviewing the creative process in this visual form, I feel like I have learned a lot, and will continue to learn more now that I know how to find them. The issues of copyright are less interesting to me, though I appreciate the tightrope of intellectual property rights and freedom to innovate that everyone seems to be walking. I would love to see more written about the design process as it applies to fashion, but I can see that the Hong Kong research study used design models from other fields like architecture, presumably because they couldn’t find enough literature in their own field.

Since my interests focus mostly on the creative process, I think looking forward I would be more inclined to broaden my topic to focus on the creative process in a number of fields, preferably those which have a more robust literature to draw on. I might work with some questions around innovation in the workplace and how to balance the need to produce for profit without stifling the output with unreasonable and unhelpful expectations. Or perhaps I could look into the actual neuropsychology of creativity, and what are some of the conditions that seem to consistently help artists produce good creative work.

Thanks for reading!