How fashion designers are blurring the lines between runways and art galleries

Sterling Ruby and Raf Simons's Madison Avenue Calvin Klein store. Photo by Elizabeth Felicella.

In March, eight exclamation points marched across the back wall of the Grand Palais at Akris’s fall 2019 ready-to-wear show in Paris, exuberant punctuation in the all-white room. Those exclamation points came from a 2006 work by the late artist Richard Artschwager and were made of horsehair, a material associated with upholstery rather than art.

In his nearly 40 years as Akris creative director, Albert Kriemler has frequently joined forces with artists. For past collections he has worked with 103-year-old modernist painter Carmen Herrera, contemporary photographer Thomas Ruff and minimalist architect Sou Fujimoto. “It’s really always based in my case on my personal experience with the artist,” Kriemler says. He works only with the artist’s approval. “You do it with the green light,” he says.

Other artist-designer collaborations that surfaced during the fall 2019 shows: Stella McCartney sent multiple looks down the Paris runway adorned with necklaces and belts made of wrapped and woven yarn by Sheila Hicks, an 84-year-old fiber artist who received a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2018. A couple of weeks earlier in New York, designers Adi Gil and Gabriel Asfour incorporated scraps of discarded paintings by their neighbor, artist Stanley Casselman, into the fall collection they showed at the Guggenheim Museum.