For decades, art and fashion have occupied parallel but distinct tracks. There have been moments of convergence—think Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet costumes, Salvador Dalí’s sartorial collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli, and Keith Haring’s “Pop Shop”—but the art world generally likes to consider itself above the fickle trends and blatant commercialism of fashion, while fashion, even at its most elite, presents an air of aspirational egalitarianism. More and more, however, these once-distinct realms are bleeding into each other, whether that means artists fabricating wearable sculptures or designers creating gallery-ready garments.
Los Angeles has proved an especially fertile ground for these developments, owing to the city’s historical disdain for barriers between high and low culture and diverse creative economy that supports artists across disciplines and industries. The convergence of art and design in LA is doubtless material as well as social: While New York may be recognized as the fashion capital of the US, LA is where clothes are made, boasting over 45,000 garment workers, making it the nation’s largest apparel manufacturing center. Likewise, the city’s film industry employs a wide spectrum of artists and designers who fabricate props, sets, wardrobes, and effects.
CDG SHIRT x Westfall – Yannis Vlamos.
In a twenty minute walk through Downtown Los Angeles, it is possible to pass between internationally recognized art galleries and museums, garment factories, fabric stores, and the loft studios of painters and prop fabricators—and that is only one neighborhood. It is no wonder that this is a city that produced artists like Lisa Anne Auerbach, a fiber artist who creates sweaters adorned with political themes, meshing blunt, confrontational messages with folksy warmth. Auerbach, a role model for many in the younger generation of artist-designers, began knitting sweaters in 1994. She’d studied photography in college, but post-graduation, found herself without access to a darkroom and turned to a more accessible art form. Auerbach got her start around the same time as another godmother of functional art, Joshua Tree–based artist Andrea Zittel, who sews Constructivist-inspired uniforms as part of her comprehensive A-Z Enterprise that encompasses architecture, furniture, and other objects. Both Auerbach and Zittel’s work uses the vernacular of design to pose the question that looms over both contemporary art and design: How should we live?
Or maybe the question is, “How can we survive?” As much as artists have become interested in fashion, fashion has likewise embraced art. Prada and LVMH run art foundations; visit any of the leading contemporary art fairs and you will encounter corners devoted to artist-edition fashion collaborations. According to a 2024 Business of Fashion story, “Luxury brands are counting on both to help reverse a downturn that’s seen sales stagnate or decline at most major brands. Art Basel Miami Beach serves as ground zero for a new class of American luxury consumers,” including crypto-millionaires and other consumers whose way into fine art is as likely to be KAWS as Kandinsky. Art gives a fashion industry plagued by fast fashion a veneer of authenticity and meaning; fashion gives art marketability, and in a strained economy, both sectors seem willing to do business with the other.
“Thirty years ago, it was considered outrageous for an artist to collaborate with a fashion brand. Now it’s totally accepted. It’s seen as another art medium,” gallerist Jeffrey Deitch told me. Deitch has long been interested in reaching beyond the boundaries of the white cube, highlighting fashion designers Stephen Sprouse and Jeremy Scott, experimental architecture firm LO-TEK, and musicians Devendra Banhart and Fischerspooner. (He also co-curated the seminal if controversial “Art in the Streets” exhibition at LA’s MOCA in 2011.) For the past five years, the gallery has organized an annual Art Products Market, showcasing a wide range of art, objects, and clothing, with a focus on accessibility, both in terms of content and price.
“One of our missions has always been to present this wider view of what an artist is and can be,” he said. “The challenge is to emphasize a rigorous approach. You can be populist but also rigorous and serious.”
Deitch Art Products Market. Photograph by Saru Kaftan.
The support of gallerists like Deitch has served to foster LA’s current crop of hybrid creators, many of whom honed their crafts outside of the traditional art school pipeline, a fact that no doubt contributes to their expansive conceptions of art. Brett Westfall is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer whose creative output spans clothing, paintings, prints, and immersive installations. His roots are in the SoCal street art and skateboarding scenes however, though he drew constantly as a kid growing up in Irvine, and dreamed of being an artist. He dropped out of college after a few months and began reading books on artists he admired, calling galleries that represented Basquiat and Warhol to ask how he could get a show. After a cold call to a gallery in Japan, the owner asked him to fax over some drawings, then offered him his first show.
Westfall’s entry into the fashion world was similarly unconventional. Living in LA in his early 20s, he was working at upscale boutique Ron Herman, while making his own work. After getting paint on a t-shirt a friend had silkscreened, he wore it to work, where it caught the buyer’s eye, and his first brand, Basco Chocho, was born. He refers to the work he made then as “wearable paintings.”
Since then, Westfall has developed a 20-year creative relationship with Comme des Garçons, started his own fashion brand, Westfall, and exhibited his fine art at galleries internationally. Earlier this year, in conjunction with his site-specific installation Allocation’s Time, at Dover Street Market in LA, he held a screen printing workshop in collaboration with the ICA LA, leading the participants on a group walk between the two spaces, “an invisible bridge between fine art and fashion,” he says. “Fashion is an extension of my art. My approach is always conceptual; ‘how can I convey the message I want to get through?’”
Image courtesy of Romanelli.
The support for this kind of work doesn’t just come from world-famous galleries like Jeffrey Deitch. In 2023, Eduardo Medrano Jr. founded John Doe Gallery in a storefront just south of Downtown LA with the goal of supporting his creative community of designers and artists. He did go to art school, studying commercial photography at Art Center College of Design, but grew up in LA’s street art and skate scene, where punk flyers, hip-hop graphics, graffiti, and DIY culture mingled freely, an eclecticism that can be seen in the gallery’s programming which ranges from paintings, sculpture, photo, and video, to clothing and design. “We’re taking all of these different worlds and presenting them in a non-pretentious way, so it doesn’t feel unwelcoming,” he said, in contrast to the exclusivity of the mainstream gallery scene.
Last summer, they displayed a collection of stitched-together t-shirts and furniture by Darren Romanelli and collaborators titled Bottom of the Pile; frankensteined pieces of lowbrow and underground Americana. A month earlier, they showcased a collection of bridal gowns and tuxedos by LA brand Firme Atelier. “For people born in the 90s or 2000s—DIY punk culture and high-end bespoke—both those worlds kind of mix,” he explained. Next February, the gallery will mount a show of works by Sonya Sombreuil, an artist/designer and founder of t-shirt brand COME TEES, whose paintings and clothes were recently exhibited at Deitch, and included in the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial in 2020.
Image courtesy of Zoe Alameda.
Even with so many visible artist/designers, sometimes it can take an artist time to understand how these elements combine within their distinct practice (and overcome old biases about the separation of form and function): While some artists view little distinction between different elements of their practice, Zoe Alameda kept her fine art, fashion, and tattoo work relatively discreet for most of her career, but the practices have recently begun to intersect. Her collaged, xeroxed, painted, and printed assemblages blur the line between wall works and sculpture, embodying the speed and messiness of contemporary visual culture, be it the cacophony of LA’s streetscapes or the flattening of online space. She also designs one-off t-shirts, a throwback to her teenage years growing up in Arcadia, where she sold printed t-shirts, bags, and zines at punk shows. She picked up tattooing during the pandemic, a practice that has begun to overlap with her fine art work as she tattoos the silicone frames of her paintings. “My first thought is how can I reflect what I’m going through in the fastest way possible,” she said of her multifaceted approach.
Anya Dikareva, Grasshopper, 2016. Image courtesy of Anya Dikareva.
For some artists, the idea of choosing between “design” and “art” was never that big of a problem. For Anya Dikareva, creative multiplicity ran in her family. Raised in Kiev before her family moved to the States, she is the daughter of a ceramicist mother and a graphic designer father, while her grandparents included a painter, poet, and theater director. Coming from that background, “art is something you live with,” she said. “I tried to do other things, but it wasn’t something I could let go of.” As a child, she created castles from found shards of glass and glue, and that resourcefulness characterized her current practice, which ranges from futuristic, mutant-like “wearable sculptures” that incorporate found and reused materials to delicate embroideries. Although her creations are meant to be worn, she considers what she does art, and not fashion. “One of the main appeals is that it can be taken off the wall and into the world,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be in the gallery to be seen. It’s a way for someone to embody an artwork and give it life.”
Sila, Padded Nylon Balaclava. Photo credit Sıla Ersayın.
Sila also considers her wearable creations as sculptures, but her origin story couldn’t be more different than Dikareva’s. She grew up in North Carolina, the child of Turkish immigrants, and thought she would become an engineer. She studied textile research in college, adding she “always created, but didn’t see myself as a maker…I saw fashion and art as something exclusive and terrifying.” She began designing felted masks during the pandemic, an enterprise that funded her move to LA, and gave her the courage to pursue her creative aspirations. Sila shifted from making work that would sell to making what she was interested in, creating nylon hijabs and balaclavas, inspired by Islamic design and organic patterns, while also exhibiting soft sculptures in galleries.
Like many of these artists, Sila did not begin making wearable objects as an alternative to her art career, a way to “get by,” but as an inseparable part of it. While the business of fashion and art may present infinite moments of convergence and dissonance, and critics may separate out categories of “high” and “low”, it is perhaps important to remember that artists themselves often don’t think in such binaries. Like Sila, they are just out there doing what they do, figuring out how to live, and seeing what happens. “Making work to sell to people isn’t interesting to me,” she explained. “I have two other jobs. I just want to make things that I want to make.”