Fashion is largely about our complicated relationship with the herd, so it makes sense that there should be four very different fashion-realted exhibitions on in London at the same time. Loosely speaking, two are about drawing, while the other two deal with politics, except that nothing in fashion is truly apolitical, as Georges Lepape’s illustration of a woman in tricolour stripes clutching a cockerel for Paul Poiret’s 1914 perfume ‘Mam’zelle Victoire’ demonstrates. Even René Gruau’s luxuriant drawings for Christian Dior reflect the designer’s joyous rebellion against World War II clothing shortages. And what is Gruau’s controversial decision in 1966 to show a hairy-legged, be-bathrobed man for Dior’s L’Eau Sauvage perfume, if not political? Whether it’s fashion is a more complicated question.
In ‘Dior Illustrated: René Gruau and the Line of Beauty’, at Somerset House, Gruau is revealed as that rarity, a fashion-world participant with a sense of humour; his scarlet-lipped, wand-like women and Neanderthal men acknowledge that fashion could be fun. He also understood that a woman advertising stockings is, in a sense, an accessory, so why show her face or torso? He credited his viewers with imagination and a fashion vocabulary, and the result was a career at Dior that far outlasted its creator (Christian died in 1957; Gruau worked there and elsewhere until the late 1990s) and a bubbling joie de vivre that is still capable of popping any portentousness – particularly necessary in this show, where even a male figure who resembles the animated guy at the beginning of the film ‘Grease’ before he plops on the eponymous goo is accompanied by a humourless curatorial riff on monochrome shadows and perspective.
Far better to place Gruau in context, in ‘Drawing Beauty’ at the Design Museum, where the illustrations range from Lepape’s wonderful, Japanese-influenced watercolours right up to the softly beguiling modern monotypes of Aurore de la Morinerie – interestingly, the only female artist in an exhibition that covers a century of drawings of and for women. Gender also pops up, so to speak, all over ‘Aware: Art Fashion Identity’, at the Royal Academy, art’s meditation on the politics of fashion, most brilliantly in Cindy Sherman’s video of a paper doll (Sherman herself, as usual) being summarily deprived of the right to dress herself. It's more obliquel in Kimsooja’s film of Mumbai dhobi wallahs (laundrymen) or Andreas Gursky’s identically white-clothed brokers at the Kuwait Stock Exchange.
Some of the fashion-art hybrids here are dull or obvious or both (Gillian Wearing’s array of police, blinking and shuffling after 60 minutes in the same position) but a lot is inventively nuts – Azra Aksamija’s ‘Nomadic Mosque’ (yes folks, a dress that becomes a private mosque, for prayer on the move) – or thought-provoking or occasionally, shattering. Handan Börüteçene’s dress sewn with actual Byzantine fragments has a deep engagement with history; Helen Storey’s lovely, ethereal dress that will dissolve in water comments on our environmental and sartorial future (it’s suspended above a brimming bowl). But Sharif Waked’s film ‘Chic Point’, with its beauteous male models sauntering the catwalk in wittily hole-pocked clothing, ends as devastatingly as a bullet’s flight, with photographs of Palestinian men at checkpoints, revealing similar body parts at gunpoint. As long as baring your midriff can be a political act, the course of fashion is unlikely to run smooth.
In the Barbican’s ‘Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion’, history starts, ostensibly, in 1981 – except, of course, that it’s still as long as a piece of wool. Sure, Yohji Yamamoto and the legendary Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons both debuted in Paris that year, but they didn’t exactly walk out of the ether – Issey Miyake was already established there, and Le Figaro’s disgusted comment, in 1982, that Yamamoto’s were ‘clothes for the end of the world that look as if they’ve been bombed to shreds’ was as political, 37 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as it was tactless.
You don’t have to be Miyake, creating origami-influenced outfits that collapse into perfect hectagons, or Kawakubo, reinventing the kimono or sending a model in whiteface down the catwalk wearing a red circle on a white background, to understand that fashion goes back to the fig leaf, and that every innovation, up to and including the sheer lunacy of modern Japanese design (any takers for an elephant-shaped tartan sporran?), sprouts from its cultural antecedents like a 1980s fashion victim from her legwarmers. All four of these exhibitions bear witness to the gratifying fact that fashion – that obsession with novelty made cloth – can never quite shrug off the past.
‘Dior Illustrated: René Gruau and the Line of Beauty’ is at Somerset House until Jan 9 2011. ‘Drawing Fashion’ is at the Design Museum until Mar 6 2011. ‘GSK Contemporary – Aware: Art Fashion Identity’ is at the Royal Academy until Jan 30 2011. ‘Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion’ is at the Barbican until Feb 6 2011.