CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert LAUREN PALMOR // PIET MONDRIAN. PROTO-FASHION THEORIST //PIET MONDRIAN. PROTO-FASHION THEORIST// ---------------------------------------------- SUBMISSION DATE: 08/01/2015 // ACCEPTANCE DATE 13/05/2015 // PUBLICATION DATE: 15/06/2015 (pp. 39-50) LAUREN PALMOR UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON [email protected] /// KEYWORDS: Fashion theory, Piet Mondrian, J.C. Flügel, Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, Sonia Delaunay. ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to contextualize Mondrian‘s few writings on fashion within his larger interest in oppositions and the work of early fashion theorists, who similarly framed dress in terms of binaries and antonyms. Like Mondrian, early fashion theorists were invested in ideas of opposition and universality, similarities that suggest that Mondrian may find conceptual allies in the first generation of fashion theorists, particularly J. C. Flügel, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Simmel. Mondrian‘s largely overlooked approach to fashion theory sheds light on the understanding of his complex aesthetic philosophy, and, while much has been written about Mondrian‘s influence on fashion, there remains a need to navigate Mondrian‘s own inspiration by fashion. /// Piet Mondrian‘s legacy has escaped the historical limits of his own discipline—his influence has been felt in nearly every sphere of the visual arts, seemingly by osmosis. He has had a demonstrable visual impact on graphic design, home decor, and fashion, and his presence can be experienced by any hapless shopper who finds himself in a department store surrounded by handbags decorated with divided planes of red, yellow, and blue. Mondrian‘s uncompromisingly abstract, neoplastic style has long oscillated between high art and popular culture (Troy 2006: 15-36), and when one is determined to find an elegant intersection between Mondrian and design, the most frequently cited example is that of his influence on fashion. REVISTA FORMA //VOL 11 PRIMAVERA 2015 // ISSN 2013-7761 // 39 LAUREN PALMOR // PIET MONDRIAN. PROTO-FASHION THEORIST The most famous instance of Mondrian‘s impact on dress is undoubtedly Yves Saint Laurent‘s application of the artist‘s motifs in a collection of minimalist sack dresses, which debuted in the 1960s. One magazine reported, ―The Mondrian style in fashion has existed precisely since August 2, 1965. On this day, Yves Saint Laurent showed his Winter Collection in Paris for the first time‖ (MacKrell, 2005: 148). The collection of spare, playful, primary-colored dresses was first inspired by a book on Mondrian given to the young Saint Laurent by his mother, and the designer‘s tribute to neoplasticism resulted in a collection he credited with the feat of ―opening him up‖ as a designer for the first time (Life Magazine, 1965: 46-53). Saint Laurent was also inspired by the simple construction of the sack dress, a minimalist shape which easily leant itself to a design method which utilized the planes and lines employed by Mondrian. The dresses were, like the painter‘s own canvases, far more complex than they seemed. Saint Laurent reworked Mondrian‘s motifs to investigate different parts of a woman‘s body and the way they could interact with dress in the simplest way possible (Rubenstein, 2012: 128). The planarity of the dresses was ideal for a color block technique, which required piecing together individual squares of colored wool jersey in order to build a garment in a sensitive and logical way. This approach simultaneously allowed seams to be hidden by the structure of black lines. In this manner, Saint Laurent‘s black lines function similarly to Mondrian‘s own, shaping the spaces between the planes and the form of the canvas or garment. This practical construction method reveals a great attention to the details of Mondrian‘s own working methods and demonstrates Saint Laurent‘s esteem for De Stijl experimentation. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000) Mondrian‘s investigations helped Saint Laurent infuse the simple look of the 1960s with intellectual seriousness and a concern with minimalism. His frocks were referred to ―the dresses of tomorrow‖(Harper’s Bazaar, 1965) and Saint Laurent‘s concept of treating garments like canvases was a radical departure for fashion and its relationship to art (Mackrell, 2005: 148). The Mondrian dress succeeded in bringing the concepts of planarity and line that had preoccupied the artist throughout his life to the boutiques of Fifth Avenue. The relationship between Mondrian and fashion is usually limited to these types of dialogues about Saint Laurent‘s design, and nearly any investigation of De Stijl and fashion will engage with the YSL 1965 Winter Collection. However, Mondrian also held his own beliefs about fashion, ideas that predated the ―Mondrian dress,‖ sometimes by almost fifty years. Restricting the relationship between Mondrian and fashion to Saint Laurent‘s work is reductive, and does not serve the process of evaluating the artist‘s own complex perspectives on the practices of fashion.1 While Mondrian‘s writings have been analyzed to reveal his thoughts on art, philosophy, and spirituality, the artist‘s ideas about fashion and the meaning of dress still demand more attention. This seems like a serious omission, as Mondrian‘s few documented ideas on dress can serve as concrete examples of his sometimes-esoteric perspectives on form. Mondrian was fascinated by the idea of dress as a referent to the larger world. In 1932 he wrote: ―people do not see why a painter should concern himself with the laws of 1 In her book Couture Culture, Nancy Troy describes the way in which the connection between art and fashion has traditionally been underestimated and limited to surface connections, like designers visually responding to art in their garments. Couture Culture is rare in its hesitance to compare art with clothing in this way, which Troy prefaces by stating, ―Settling for a narrow definition of the relationship between art and fashion in terms of garments designed by artists or clothing that qualifies as art, (previous approaches) privileged formal similarities that are often visually powerful but, nevertheless, generally lack substance when it comes to the exploration of deeper, structural relations which, in turn, do not necessarily result in any stylistic or formal resemblances between particular items of clothing and specific works of art.‖ (Troy, 2003: 3). REVISTA FORMA //VOL 11 PRIMAVERA 2015 // ISSN 2013-7761 // 40 LAUREN PALMOR // PIET MONDRIAN. PROTO-FASHION THEORIST life; they do not understand that the laws of life realize themselves perhaps most clearly in art‖ (Lipsey, 1988: 67). Is fashion not a system within which the laws of life are expressed? Mondrian wrote ceaselessly about his quest for unity in a single outlet. Does this impulse not find its most convenient expression in the study of dress, which is essentially the study of externalization as it is written on the body? Mondrian‘s few writings on fashion complement his larger interest in oppositions, ideas that can be placed in a conversation with those of the early fashion theorists, who also framed dress in terms of binaries and antonyms. Like Mondrian, many early fashion theorists were similarly invested in ideas of opposition and universality, and these similarities suggest that Mondrian may find allies in his conceptual investigations among proto-fashion theorists like J. C. Flügel, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Simmel.2 In her essay on Mondrian‘s late style, Nancy Troy writes, ―It is not certain that Mondrian himself would have been entirely unhappy with the uses to which his work has been put in the popular domain‖ (Troy, 2006: 25). Mondrian‘s adoration of popular culture was well documented, both in his own writings and in the accounts of friends. His ideas on dress, while generally overlooked, can be found in the same sphere as his praise for these other popular arts, most of which can be found in The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, the definitive source for English translations of the artist‘s essays (Mondrian, 1993)3. In this collection of texts, it is clear that Mondrian approached his experience of life and art with a regulatory compulsion, and this impulse extended to his thoughts on dress. Mondrian has been characterized by his interest in searching for the inherent character of things (James, 1963-4: 108) and his utopian aims held that the progressive development of culture should eventually express itself in the culmination of the total suppression of the natural, simultaneously aiding the expression of absolute beauty. The same inclinations that fueled his drive towards the exploration of the plane is shared by his impulse towards finding the pure and universal in other cultural products, like fashion. Mondrian‘s organizational inclination, most often articulated in his writings as systems of dualities, is mirrored in his thoughts on fashion, which are structured around oppositions. His ideas on dress are shaped like the ideas of conflict he expresses in pairs like inward/outward, spirit/nature, mind/matter, abstract/real, universal/individual, expansion/limitation, joy/suffering, and male/female (Crowther, 1997: 130). In addition to a system of oppositions, Mondrian‘s ideas on dress also mirror the Theosophist notions that every person and object has a reason for existence and an intrinsic necessity (Ibid, 129). While fashion is not often regarded in terms of its role in the spiritual progressions found in Theosophy, it is Mondrian‘s unique perspective that allows him to expand dress in this way. Mondrian‘s personal philosophies elude fixity (Troy, 2006: 15) in ways that are in turn unpredictable and sometimes disconcerting, and his ideas on dress are suspect to such characterization. One of his earlier ideas on dress falls in line with his predilection for the unexpected: in 1917 he wrote in The New Plastic in Painting: ―In all fields, life grows increasingly abstract while remaining real.