Why clothes matter in the art world
The story of how dressing up relates to artistic practice is as old as art history. Consider the dramatic outfits Rembrandt assembled for his self-portraits: staged exercises in mythology and authenticity (he posed, variously, as the Prodigal Son, an Eastern potentate, even a painter). But these are not Charlie Porter’s subjects in What Artists Wear. His sprawling narrative mixes biographies from the Western art worlds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with reflections on the social power of clothes in a time when the boundaries between labour and leisure have grown ever hazier. Why discuss the clothing of artists at all? Artists are of special interest, Porter argues, because they search for different ways of living from the rest of us. Their work, and lives, constitute “a continual push for self-expression”; their studios become “self-contained worlds”.