SESSION: Fashionability and the Art Market

Temporal dynamics of rise and decline are key drivers in the art world as a marketplace, and they often impact on art production, too. In his 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin agreed with Fuchs’ critique that art historians did not sufficiently attend to ‘the question of the success of a work of art’. To some extent, this remains true today. It separates, for example, art market journalism covering fashionable artists and trends in the global art world from the scholarly discourse that later addresses the work of such artists, potentially inscribing them into the academic and institutional canon. According to Fuchs, ‘the uncovering of the real reasons for the greater or lesser success of an artist, the reasons for the duration of his success or its opposite, is one of the most important of the problems which […] attach themselves to art.’

This panel welcomes proposals that address fashionability or time-limited popularity in relation to: artistic styles or movements, individual artists or groups, or the impact of short-term trends on the decision-making of collectors, galleries and dealers, or arts criticism and art historical writing. Since fashions in the art world extend to works of art themselves, we also invite papers that cover fashion as garment: from the role a fashionable appearance can play for an artist to project contemporariness to concerns that might arise when an artwork represents a fashionable person. Proposals for papers can cover any geographical or cultural context, period, and artistic medium.

Session Convenors:

Stephanie Dieckvoss, Courtauld Institute of Art

Anne Reimers, University of the Arts London

Session Speakers:

Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York

Ukiyo-e as a Fashion Catalogue during Japan’s Edo Period

One of the series of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints known as “Hinagata Wakana No Hatsumoyou (A Pattern Book for the New Year’s Kimono Designs)” served as a fashion catalogue and advertorial during Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868). The series depicted fashionable high-class courtesans known as Oiran who lived in the licensed pleasure quarters where prostitution was legal. These women were known as trendsetters who wore kimono with newly designed motifs and accessories for the new year. I examine the works of Isoda Koryusai (1735-1790), who published about a hundred pieces in the series between 1775 and 1781. He included the names of Oiran in each painting, and as a result, they became celebrity models of the time. The project was later handed over to other artists, such as Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815) and Katsukawa Shunzan (?-1841). Some of the kimono merchants were involved in this fashion project since the kimono with new designs depicted in Ukiyo-e functioned as advertorials and were sold at certain kimono shops.

A sophisticated publishing system with its institutionalized network was taking shape, and Ukiyo-e was used as a medium to spread fashion information and set new trends. I also examine how Ukiyo-e began to diminish in 1842 as the government implemented censorship and restrictions on specific art genres, and the artists could no longer paint courtesans and Kabuki actors who were dressed in flamboyant kimono. The censorship law was lifted in 1850, but Ukiyo-e as a publishing industry never recovered, and it was gradually replaced by photography during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

Natalie Rudd, Independent Art Historian, UK

In the Glossies: Sculpture, Fashion & the Art Market in 1980s London

This paper traces the productive intersections between the worlds of sculpture, fashion and the contemporary art market in 1980s London. It investigates how glossy fashion magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s & Queen, provided an important platform for women art dealers to advertise and promote the work of their represented artists. By introducing emerging practices to an aspirational and predominantly female readership, for example, gallerist Nicola Jacobs sought to expand London’s fledgling contemporary art market, anticipating the national enthusiasm for ‘young British art’ in the 1990s.

For women working in sculpture, glossy magazines provided crucial visibility within a gallery system shaped by entrenched gender bias. This paper considers both the risks and the opportunities of aligning with fashion and reveals significant material and formal synergies between the two fields. A determined fashioning of sculpture is traceable across the decade, evident in the work of Shelagh Cluett, Veronica Ryan and Shelagh Wakely, among others: the tailored coating of surfaces and forms, sheet metal beaten to evoke lustrous cloth, the baroque swagger of unfolding fabric, and glossy pages sliced into ethereal wisps.

Anchored in a sustained programme of oral history and archival research conducted for my PhD thesis, On the Brink: Precariousness in Sculpture by Women, 1979–1993, this paper illuminates the innovative actions of creative and enterprising women whose contributions have been marginalised within the art-historical record. The recency of this history offers a sobering reminder of how women’s histories remain precarious, drifting in and out of fashion, or disappearing altogether.

Cristiana Tejo, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Ana Leticia Fialho, Independent Researcher

The Market of Attention: Fashionability and the Shifting Roles of Curators and Critics in Brazil

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, digital businesses and social media have become not only more relevant windows for communication, sales and promotion, but platforms that may be reshaping roles and dynamics of the art world. The role of curators and art critics in Brazil has been challenged by the rise of social media amid public disinvestment in art and growing dominance of the market. As state funding, institutional stability, and critical independent platforms decline, visibility becomes a survival strategy.

Players once engaged in building symbolic value through in-depth curatorial and critical processes; nowadays, they compete with new agents capable of generating visibility in response to fast-fashion trends, relying on social networks to create and maintain relevance and access opportunities. As a result, boundaries between artistic discourse, lifestyle, and market promotion blur: art advisors, curators and art critics collaborate with fashion brands, stage daily routines as aesthetic narratives, and circulate within influencer logic. Within Brazil’s broader neoliberal and post-pandemic art system, attention seems to replace critical thought.

The fashionability of agents – their ability to remain seen, adaptable, and desirable – becomes a new measure of value. Is this shift redefining curatorial and critical labour as much as it is evidence of institutional fragility? Whether we are facing a rupture or an adjustment of the conventions ruling the art world (Howard Becker) may be too early to assess. Our paper will argue that, in the Brazilian context, visibility increasingly equals recognition.

Dorothy Barenscott, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver

Fashion Victim: Kitsch Culture, Art Collecting, and the Tech Billionaire Class

Since the turn of the 21st century, a ten-fold increase in the number of billionaires globally has resulted in the technology sector disproportionality representing the top rankings of the world’s richest individuals. Of those, almost all are art collectors, and their collections favour bankable and fashionable artists, past and present, working in popular and urban art idioms that incorporate elements of visual kitsch by artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Banksy, and KAWS.

My paper seeks to examine the broader and critical dimensions of the outsized influence the world’s tech billionaires exert on the perceived fashionability and emergence of a hypermodern kitsch culture that is today gaining power, legitimacy, and influence, while simultaneously reshaping the contemporary art world and global art markets. As an update to a form of low art first contextualized around illiberalism, populism, and a culture of grievance associated with twentieth century fascism, 21st century kitsch culture is closely tied to mechanisms of the financialization of everyday life, social media influence, discordant masculinity, and the disruptive role played by the crypto-sphere and AI technologies in global visual culture. At the core of my argument, I will work through the framework of fashion victim “commandments” first argued by New York journalist Michelle Lee (2003) to unpack the complexities and contradictions of the art-collecting practices of the tech billionaire class, pointing to the shifting dynamics, potential directions, and unexpected consequences linked to their aesthetic tastes and interests.