Artful Fashion Meets Fashionable Art at Fairs

As art fairs and festivals bring a cosmopolitan crowd to London and Paris, a different question comes to the fore: Is art now more fashionable than fashion?

Last week’s Frieze art fair in London at Regent’s Park, with its two giant tents for master works and contemporary art, was a magnet for the young, smart, international set.

In Paris, this week’s International Contemporary Art Fair FIAC kicked off with a dinner hosted Saturday by Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the premier international modern art dealers. It was more chic than any event earlier in the month during Paris fashion week.

The cosmopolitan crowd, which included Anselm Kiefer through Gilbert and George and Anthony Gormley to Marc Quinn, also attracted from the fashionable world the jewelers Victoire de Castellane and Gaia Repossi, the designers Haider Ackermann, Christian Louboutin and Kris Van Assche and the philanthropist Bianca Jagger.

The gritty chic Lou Doillon, placed in the fashion camp via her mother Jane Birkin, entertained guests.

The dinner was held to celebrate the opening of a spread of new Thaddaeus Ropac galleries — vast interlinked buildings in the Pantin district, to the northeast of Paris.

Art and fashion collaborations know no borders. Art Basel Miami Beach has become such a magnet for smart society that Prada has had a pop-up shop there and Dior an artistic collaboration with the German artist Anselm Reyle. And in December, Art Basel Miami Beach will host the 60th birthday celebration of down-jacket brand Moncler.

The art/fashion thing has been going on for two decades, with the regeneration of downtown areas through art galleries and performance events now an established method of upgrading an area.

That idea is embedded in Dasha Zhukova’s Garage cultural center in St. Petersburg and in the opening last year of a vast new White Cube gallery in London’s Bermondsey. The same concept is behind the current developments of Mr. Ropac and the American art dealer Larry Gagosian, whose new gallery is by Le Bourget airport north of Paris.

So art is fashionable — as it was in the era of Art Nouveau or in Paris in the 1920s. But what is fashionable for art lovers to wear?

The codes of artistic society demand that punters play the part, as they did in the fin de siècle era when Bohemian looks were in vogue.

An exhibition of “Bohèmes,” at the Palais Royal in Paris (through Jan. 14) has a section devoted to the poets and artists from Baudelaire and Rimbaud through Van Gogh and Picasso.

The artistic attire of those creative figures was unconventional and mildly exotic, worn with a mix of flamboyance and melancholy. The key items included a floppy scarf, breeches, vests and jackets, in a mix of painterly colors and worn with a studied deshabille.

The fashion key is a subtle touch of eccentricity. The men who walk the galleries today tend to have a meld of different surfaces — tweed, velvet or ribbed corduroy — and graphic patterns on shirts with a flash of bright color on a scarf.

For women, the style choice is simpler: the art devotees wear Prada. Anyone who wondered who would buy the bold, geometric pants suits offered up at MiuMiu for the autumn season had only to visit Frieze, where almost every version of what had appeared on the runway for autumn was presented as perambulating art.

Even Raf Simons, newly crowned as designer at Dior, and a devotee of Frieze since its inception 10 years ago, wore Prada from fur-collar coat to gilt studded shoes.

The polka dots that Marc Jacobs designed for Louis Vuitton, inspired by the obsessive Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, were conspicuous by their absence.

Issey Miyake’s pleats are a staple of the art world, and the Japanese maestro has just brought out a book to celebrate 10 years of his invention.

“Pleats Please Issey Miyake,” by Midori Kitamura ( Taschen), shows in its 576 pages the scope of pleats horizontal, vertical or zig-zag. The fashion oeuvre even include prints of digitally-realized prints of bodies within the architectural lines.

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons was another designer in the frame at Frieze. The flower patterns on flat plane clothes looked like walking works of art. Their only competition was a flower sculpture seen outside in the park.

The fact that the passage into the Frieze tent had walls with a pattern of colorful sneakers, or ‘’Sleeping Loafers” by the German artist Thomas Bayrle, only added to the impression that fashion and art were locked in an embrace.

Why not? Joseph Beuys, an artist who made emotional and meaningful felt suits, is one of the figures whose work is on display at the new Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. The artist’s work underlined the link between creativity and cloth.

So for viewers and visitors to the current art fairs, the challenge is to be a living, breathing, walking example of fashionable art.

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