Fashion and Art:

Mondrian’s Dress

Derek BlasbergWhen I’ve spoken to others for this series, I slide this question in at the end, after they’ve warmed up a bit. But since you’ve written entire books on the subject, I thought we’d start here: Do you think fashion can ever be art? Or, when can art be fashion?

Nancy J. TroyWell, one of the things I find interesting is, rather than just assessing fashion and art on their output—an artistic form or a beautiful garment—and asking if they intersect in some way, I’d prefer to look at how those two worlds can revolve around the question of the original and the reproduction, or a series of reproductions. Both artists and designers must deal with that question.

DBI’ve found fashion people are reluctant to claim art status because it seems like such a lofty aesthetic mountain to climb, while art people sometimes want to claim that only some designers have reached art status, like Alexander McQueen or Yves Saint Laurent. But the idea of reproduction as the medium is a new response to this question.

NJTIt may come from my background in early-twentieth-century art, where the concept of the original and the reproduction, and their relationship to each other, was paramount. Many artists were dealing with the machine as subject matter—people like Marcel Duchamp, who was making convergences between works of art and mass-produced objects. That was similar to what was happening in the world of couture at the time, where there was a kind of convergence of copying in the world of ready-to-wear that really put couturiers on the defensive. The readymade, a mass-produced object that Duchamp signed as an artwork, is very similar, I felt, to a couture dress that was designed to be copied. Many couturiers used titles, names, women’s names, or flowers or whatever associations and they signed their originals and some of their copies too.

DBThe first half of the twentieth century is an interesting part of this conversation because that was a time when it seemed less taboo to mix it all up. You have Coco Chanel’s relationship with Jean Cocteau, for example, and Pablo Picasso at the Ballets Russes.

NJTAbsolutely. We’ve realized that since the early twentieth century, since Cubism, artists were incorporating into their work aspects of pop culture—newspaper clippings or what have you—and then with Dada and Surrealism the boundaries of what in the nineteenth century had been considered a finished work of art, one that could be considered ready to be shown in public, changed dramatically. Instead of a look of finish or unity, difference and fragmentation became not just more acceptable but actually sought after as an expressive mode. This greatly changed how progressive artists thought about what they were creating, and certainly many of them were really interested in fashion. They were getting involved with advertising; Kurt Schwitters, for example, included women in advertisements in his Merz images. Perhaps that’s a really art-historical answer—

DBThat’s what we’re here for! Give us academia.

NJTIn my own work, realizing the degree to which fashion penetrated the museum was massive. If the museum is the bastion of what defines art as fine art, which for me is one way to think about it, fashion designers were posing models in museums. At the same time, artists were making textiles and clothing designs. I think this idea that these worlds are separate is a blindness of modernism.

DBNancy, how did you get into this academic field? Where are you from?

NJTI’m from New York City. I grew up on the East Side in a room I shared with my younger sister. There were two beds in that room. Over her bed, my mother put a reproduction of a [Joan] Miró and over mine was a reproduction of a [Piet] Mondrian.

DBIs that true?

NJTThat is really true! It’s very crazy, because you once asked me, “What was the first Mondrian you saw?” And that was it.

DBDid your sister go into the study of Miró?

NJtNot so much. She became a lawyer and now she’s a therapist.

DBBut from that bed on, you were on the Mondrian track.

NJTYes, I was on a very straight and narrow path.

DBYou and I met at the Costume Institute at the Met at a lecture about your book Mondrian’s Dress, which came out this year. When did you start working on the book?

NJTA long time ago! That book began as part of a chapter in a prior book, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, which was about what happened to Mondrian after he died, in 1944. How did his work circulate in the world? I first talked about those dresses then, but I recognized that there was a lot more to be said. That book was published in 2013, so it took me about ten years.

DBYour new book details Mondrian’s posthumous existence in the fashion world via a series of dresses designed by Yves Saint Laurent in 1965. One thing I found fascinating and surprising was that Saint Laurent didn’t even know who Mondrian was! What did you find most surprising when researching the book?

NJTI was very surprised by that as well! [Laughter] When I was in Paris working on the book, I asked Pierre Bergé if Saint Laurent had seen a Mondrian before making the dress. And the answer was no, but he’d seen reproductions in a book. And that, for an art historian, was shocking. Wait, he hadn’t seen an original? He started in the world of the copy?

DBWhen did you ask Bergé that?

NJTAround 2015. He died in 2017. It was very funny; the first time I went to see him, I of course asked myself how I was going to impress him, which was fairly ridiculous since there wasn’t a category in which I could do that. But I brought him a copy of a book that I’d written earlier about fashion, Couture Culture [2003]. It’s primarily about Paul Poiret, an early-twentieth-century designer who was paralleling the Ballets Russes and was intrigued by the Wiener Werkstätte and things like that. So I gave him this book, which I thought was going to create an entrée for me into the world of fashion, and he invited me into his office. He was extremely nice, and he said to me, “I hated Poiret, his work was atrocious.”

DBWell, you definitely made an impression! Did he respect your interest in the Mondrian dress and in that fashion moment?

NJTHe approved of the idea that I wanted to research it, or else I wouldn’t have been able to get as far as I did.

DBSomething else that struck me in the book was how much I’d underestimated how far this specific Mondrian dress had filtered into other designs, knockoff designs, copies, and affordable options. As someone who loves existing in this gray area between fashion and art, I thought it was great that there was a Mondrian dress for two and a half bucks at the local mall for the Missouri housewife.

NJTI do too. This is the complete fascination of Mondrian as a designer. In The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, I talked about how difficult that transition is, and how when it was happening, shortly after his death, this idea emerged that Mondrian was principally design, not, let’s call it fine art, or works of art, that people looked carefully at, took seriously, and understood that there were beautiful surfaces and incredible brushwork. Not only that, but the composition was arrived at over a long period and in a kind of tension with some of Mondrian’s other work. His painting was very complicated as painting, and there’s a tension in the history between that notion and the idea that what made him so popular was that these things are fabulous works of design. So maybe to reverse the question that you asked, it wasn’t, obviously, that Saint Laurent made a better Mondrian-on-a-dress than anybody else had done. He wasn’t trying to copy a painting; he did not sit down and say, Okay, I’m going to take this Mondrian painting and put it on my dress. But I do think he was extremely good at appropriating the iconic image.

DBOf course Mondrian was dead when the dress debuted, in 1965. Do you know what his descendants or his circle or anyone who knew him thought about Saint Laurent’s dress?

NJTMondrian’s heir, a man named Harry Holtzman, really thought that Saint Laurent should have paid him for the rights to Mondrian’s name and work. But he never got it together to do anything about it through a lawyer. In 1969, though, the Orangerie mounted the first retrospective of Mondrian’s work in France, of course in Paris, where he’d lived for many of the significant years of his career, the 1920s and ’30s. One of Mondrian’s biographers, Michel Seuphor, who’d been a friend of Mondrian’s, was interviewed in the exhibition as three models from the couture house did a little twirl there, and he was asked, “What do you think Mondrian would have thought of this, seeing his paintings on the bodies of these women?” He said Mondrian would have loved it. “Mondrian loved beautiful women! He would have been very pleased to see this happening.” I believe Seuphor was thinking of the Mondrian who’d been interested in jazz, and certainly in modernity and what people have described as the joining of art and life, and he would have liked to see the dissolution of boundaries between art, architecture, design, and fashion. He didn’t write much about it, actually said very little about it, but that’s a kind of eyewitness account.

DBHave you seen any recent or contemporary versions of a designer like Saint Laurent copying or incorporating an iconic painting into a garment?

NJTI’m the wrong person to ask. I can’t imagine there aren’t any. And Saint Laurent was very interested in that interplay, and truly inspired by so many different periods and even geographies. So I assume that others have been as well, but I haven’t looked into it. You can fill me in.

DBThere are other examples, like Gianni Versace putting a lot of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns on embellished jumpsuits and silk blouses in the ’90s. Later, Stella McCartney asked Jeff Koons to create prints and cartoons that she put on dresses. But the point I think I would make, and I would imagine you would agree, is that it hasn’t been done as memorably as Mondrian and Saint Laurent here. No one else has written a book explicitly about it!

NJTOne would think that Warhol, who succeeded in more or less breaking every barrier you possibly could break, could have managed that. But maybe he didn’t focus on it for long enough. And, oh, there’s Elsa Schiaparelli, who worked with Salvador Dalí. She would be an example of a different kind of engagement because she was not inspired by particular paintings. Nevertheless, there’s a lot more to be said than only the appearance of the dress design. The pervasiveness of designers modeling their clothes in museums next to and in conversation with works of art is a strong impulse, and I also think that while I can’t sit here and tick off names of designers, there are artists who were interested in the body, and many artists find fashion endlessly interesting and productive as a way to explore their interests.

DBI have to tell you that it was Larry Gagosian who first told me about your book and was intrigued by the concept of Mondrian and Saint Laurent. It’s interesting to me that over the years he’s never brought Schiaparelli or Versace or Stella to my attention.

NJTIt’s because the Mondrian dress was so enduring.

DBNearly six decades later and we’re still talking about it.

NJTAnd I’d venture to say that people would still go out and buy these dresses if they could.