'The most fashionable clothes of the summer look as if they could hang on a gallery wall, rather than in a wardrobe'
Is fashion art? The answer, definitively, is yes. Or at least, art is fashion. Well, OK, it is until July, when this season's trends reach their sell-by date. The most fashionable clothes of the summer look as if they could hang on a gallery wall, rather than in a wardrobe. Art is a good look right now.
It had to happen. At premier-league level, the worlds of art and fashion draw ever closer together. As the art world has become richer, it has become glossier. The Frieze art fair is wall-to-wall Céline and Dries inside, thronged with streetstyle photographers outside. Anna Wintour's latest power move on her road to becoming the aesthete empress of New York society has been to have a gallery named after her in the Metropolitan Museum.
Fashion has always taken cues from the art world, because in the fashion industry your clothes must demonstrate that you have taste. When the most high-profile public figures in the art world were curators, the traditional gallery-curator way of dressing – the art-school-meets-bluestocking vibe, dark colours, interesting jewellery, not much flesh – was mirrored on the front row of fashion shows, where layers of complicated black were a uniform for many years. As the public face of the art world has changed – Exhibit A: Dasha Zhukova– the front row has become more cocktail hour.
The new season's art-fashion is not about culture or understatement or any of the values that "arthouse" fashion (as opposed to the blockbuster commercial stuff) has traditionally represented. These clothes say: look at me. On the catwalk the clothes borrowed brush strokes, daubs and bold scribbles. Graffiti, cartoons, street art were namechecked by several designers. There is an enthusiastic energy about the colours, which are bright and primary, like unmixed smears on an artist's palette. This mood of immediacy, of play, makes the look more commercially accessible than arthouse fashion is when it is referencing the colours of Klimt or the lines of Brancusi.
At Chanel, in case anyone failed to grasp the message, clutch bags came in the shape of art portfolios. If that's not an It bag destined for Frieze, I don't know what is.
• Jess wears sweatshirt, £235, and skirt, £260, both by Cedric Charlier from net-a-porter.com. Courts, £175, russellandbromley.co.uk.
Stylist: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Sharon Ives at Carol Hayes Management.