If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". You can also see more stories from BBC Culture on Facebook and Twitter. To comment on and see more stories from BBC Designed, you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The partnership between the late fashion guru Alexander McQueen and the British artist Damien Hirst, for whom grotesque shapes of death (including pickled sharks) are recurring motifs, remind us that however impeccably dressed the Virgin Mary may be in Medieval altarpieces, there is always a skull lolling at her feet, troubling the scene. That’s not to say there aren’t some surprises. As contemporary art has gradually embraced ephemerality and the perishability of culture as an aesthetic element, finding common ground with the endless turnover of catwalk merchandise has become less compromising. Perhaps it says something about the shifting priorities of contemporary art that the collaboration between painters and sculptors working today with leading designers does not seem as inherently fraught as in early eras. What the claim does succeed in doing is thread Westwood’s fabric with a cultural seriousness it might otherwise lack. How that debt actually obtains in the look of the designs themselves is rather less clear. Vivienne Westwood’s autumn/winter 2016/17 collection, according to its promotional blurb, has been “heavily influenced” by the artists Donatello and El Greco. Often the symbiosis is more confounding than invigorating, particularly when the designer merely invokes the essence of an unwitting old master. Must the marriage of art and design always involve such friction? It’s a question worth asking as the collaboration between artists and the tastemakers of the fashion world has only accelerated in recent years. "Picasso's Cubist followers,” according to the artist’s biographer, John Richardson, “were horrified that their hero should desert them for the chic, elitist Ballets Russes." While he was rubbing shoulders with playwrights and dancers, his co-founder of Cubism, George Braque, was having his skull trepanned to alleviate the pain of the serious head injury he had suffered fighting for the French Army in the war. For those who believed that Cubism represented the breaking down of conventional and socially enforced ways of perceiving the world, Picasso’s attraction to the privileged circles of theatre-going Rome was dispiriting. Their resemblance to the angular forms that crowd Picasso’s Cubist paintings was lost on no one.
The bold and boxy costumes that Picasso contributed to the production are a jumble of urban structures, like skylines sprouting legs. Picasso and Khokhlova were both involved in the 1917 ballet Parade, conceived by the French writer Jean Cocteau. Though Saint Laurent insisted he was a great admirer of the “purity” he detected in Mondrian’s distinctively austere style, which is characterised by a simplicity of line and elegance of colour, his eagerness to commodify that aesthetic as a luxury garment is at odds with what the Dutch painter believed.
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Take Yves Saint Laurent’s famous adaptation, for a series of six day dresses that the French designer unveiled in 1965, of the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian’s soulful grids. Sometimes that collision of sensibility is comical. Any attempt to wed art with fashion is arguably destined to trigger tensions between the craving for permanence and the need for transience. By definition, their work is seasonal, if not disposable, and depends upon the constant flux of what is considered fashionable. Designers, on the other hand, rely for their very livelihood on the mutability of taste. What motivates artists is the desire to create an object or image that is timeless – a work that transcends trend. The friction between Dalí and Schiaparelli reveals an inevitable conflict between the aspirations of the artist and those of the designer.
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