Peter Som, Zac Posen, and Phillip Lim did it too, the streamlined magpie. Perhaps one of the most interesting visions during New York Fashion Week was that of layered texture. Layering and texture, two relatively ambiguous terms, combined this Fashion Week as an exercise in personality. As for layering, it's mostly the sort of slouchy-chic Americana aesthetic, which appears season after season, and as for texture, the ability of technology, art, and architecture to inspire the most innovative textiles (or at least, those reimagined through pairing). The Oscar de la Renta Fall 2008 collection gave us one of the best examples of this theme. A buttery soft plum leather skirt with tulle overlay was paired with a cashmere knit sweater in purples and greens. The mixture of these fabrics, the layering employed, was delivered seamlessly. Never has magpie been so streamlined.

Last week, at a lecture in which David Wolfe, creative director of The Doneger Group, spoke about Spring 2009 trends, he began with the topic of appropriation. Nothing new can come of fashion, he warned us, and consequentially appropriation will be a great battle in the years to come. Also touched upon, was Wolfe's articulation that one of the most interesting ways for designers to find newness is to look to art and architecture for inspiration. There, he said, newness is abundant.


A parallel story, in this narrative of appropriation, are artists like Richard Prince (who recently collaborated with Marc Jacobs, a designer not free of appropriation scrutiny) who recycles cultural material to make his own (even if it simply involves enlargement). Prince is not alone, that is, hundreds of Parson's and Chelsea College graduates are investing in their pop-saturated upbringing in this way (Parson's is also notorious for lecturing it's fashion students on the impossibility of newness, and the delicacies of fashion plagiarism), by openly sampling images or media to use as the basis of their work. The trick, it seems, is appropriating content from another medium.


Today we discovered another young artist in the Prince/Warhol gamut, Shane Bradford, pointed to us by our London-based Coutorture partner, StyleBubble. Bradford gives us more evidence of the entwining concept of property in art, where if only designers appropriated art (and not other designs), they'd be off the hook.

Vogue, British edition March 2003, Nick Knight, model: Natasha Vojnovic

"At bottom," Martin Heidegger said, "the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary." Poetry Magazine's new piece on Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" explores how art enlivens the experience of our daily lives. And while Heidegger privileges poetry as the truest form of art, there is an argument here that lends itself to fashion. Heidegger's essay uses a painting of a pair of shoes painted by Van Gogh to illustrate how art helps us achieve a new understanding of the numinous essence beyond reality. Poetry Magazine sums up the issue for us.

Looking at Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes, Heidegger suggests, something different happens. For the first time, we become aware of the two dimensions or axes in which a pair of shoes exists. On the one hand, we are struck by their physical reality: their weight and texture and color, all the qualities we tend to overlook when we wear them. At the same time, the painting allows us to imagine the life in which these shoes belong. Crucially, these two aspects of the shoes—what they are and what they do—are inextricable in the painting. In this way, he suggests, the Van Gogh painting demonstrates the double purpose of art.

We think that by using a pair of shoes, even a pair of peasants shoes, Heidegger and even Van Gogh are suggesting at something far more interesting. You see, while Heidegger contends that shoes are a practical matter, utilitarian in nature, tasks, Van Gogh raises them to art. But we wonder what happens when utility in fact meets art. What happens when the utilitarian is not simply represented in art but is in fact art. We happen to think that nexus is fashion. Footwear can transcend that artifical divide between utility and the sublime hope of art. And what is more poetic than that?