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Fashion dressed as art

Fashion dressed as art

Wednesday, 12th September 2007

The best-dressed women are usually to be found at contemporary art shows. They pull rank at the Venice Biennale or Basel.

The best-dressed women are usually to be found at contemporary art shows. They pull rank at the Venice Biennale or Basel. They are out in force at the Serpentine summer party. At the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition preview party, a vivacious female guest in Yves Saint Laurent brandished her dove-grey shoes and declared them an exhibit.

Fashion has absorbed art and it has gone to its head a little. The cognoscenti now talk of ‘pieces’ rather than items of clothing and of ‘spaces’ rather than shops. Above all they talk of Colette in rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, and Dover Street Market in Mayfair, with a smaller branch in Tokyo.

It is no longer enough to be fashionable. The higher calling is to be stylish. Of course everybody has their own style, just as everyone has a book in them, but it does not mean that it is any good. It is why we cluster round people with a talent for style, such as Kate Moss, rather than admiring impersonal designer collections. We look beyond what to wear at who we want to be.

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