Wearable art

Wearable fiber art

Artists creating wearable fiber art may use purchased finished fabrics or other materials, making them into unique garments, or may dye and paint virgin fabric. Countering the belief that art is something expensive, some clothing artists have started local companies to produce quality art work and clothing for a modest price. Wearable art is not restricted to jewellery but is also seen in graphic T-shirts and even pants.

As with any other art form, the talent and skills of artists in this field vary widely. Since the nature of the medium requires craft skills as well as artistic skills, an advanced artist may wish to study color theory, chemistry, sewing, clothing design, and computer software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Classes in clothing design and marketing are offered at colleges such as the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

The New Zealand city of Nelson gained a reputation in the field of wearable art, with its World of Wearable Art Awards, held annually since 1987 and run by Suzie Moncrieff. In 2005, the show moved to Wellington to a larger venue, although a museum of garments remains in Nelson. In Australia, the Shearwater Wearable Arts or W.A.V.E. (Wearable Arts Vision In Education) has developed from a high school initiative to become a leading wearable arts event.

Jewelry as wearable art

Some 20th-century modern artists and architects sought to elevate bodily ornamentation — that is, jewellery — to the level of fine art and original design, rather than mere decoration, craft production of traditional designs, or conventional settings for showing off expensive stones or precious metals. In Modernist Jewelry 1930-1960: The Wearable Art Movement (2004), author Marbeth Schon explores unique and innovative wearable art objects created by surrealists, cubists, abstract expressionists, and other modernist artists working in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Extreme examples

Not all garments created as wearable art are made from traditional fibers or fabrics, and not all such artworks are meant for ordinary, practical use. Performance and conceptual artists have sometimes produced examples which are more provocative than useful. Trashion is another branch of extraordinary wearable art, for example, work by Marina DeBris. The Portland Oregon Trashion Collective, Junk to Funk, has been using creating outrageous art garments out of trash.

A well-known example is the Electric Dress, a ceremonial wedding kimono-like costume consisting mostly of variously colored electrified and painted light bulbs, enmeshed in a tangle of wires, created in 1956 by the Japanese Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka. This extreme garment was something like a stage costume. Not really wearable in an everyday, practical sense, it functioned rather as part of a daring work of performance art (though the "performance" element consisted merely of the artist's wearing the piece while mingling with spectators in a gallery setting).

In Nam June Paik's 1969 performance piece called TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Charlotte Moorman played a cello while wearing a brassiere made of two small operating television sets.

Canadian artist Andrea Vander Kooij created a group of pieces called Garments for Forced Intimacy (2006). According to an essay at Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts gallery website, these hand-knit articles of clothing are designed to be worn by two people simultaneously, and they, "as the name states, compel the wearers into uncharacteristic proximity."

As wearable computing technology develops, increasingly miniaturized and stylized equipment is starting to blend with wearable art esthetics. Low-power mobile computing allows light-emitting and color-changing flexible materials and high-tech fabrics to be used in complex and subtle ways. Some practitioners of the Steampunk movement have produced elaborate costumes and accessories which incorporate a pseudo-Victorian style with modern technology and materials.