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updated 7 May 2013, 20:51
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Sun, May 05, 2013
ST Urban
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Time for fashion to be treated with some respect
by Ong Soh Chin

The other day, Mr Lionel Yeo, the chief executive of the Singapore Tourism Board, mentioned home-grown fashion labels Hansel and Ong Shunmugam when referring to Singapore's attractions.

I took this as a heartening indication that people in power are starting to regard fashion not as a frivolity, but as something worth championing.

His encouraging reference acknowledges the changing local fashion landscape, which has largely flown under the radar of the general public.

After all, local fashion does not get as much air time or column inches as, say, the arts.

Also, in terms of government funding, what is pumped into fashion, through initiatives such as the annual Asia Fashion Exchange, for example, cannot come close to the $270 million that has been committed by the Government over the next five years to bring cultural events to the heartland and boost arts education.

That funding pie, as well as an initiative where the Government matches each dollar of donations from the private sector towards the arts, was part of the recommendations of the Arts and Culture Strategic Review committee, which was convened especially to look into cultural policy.

Perhaps, Mr Yeo's high-profile endorsement of local fashion as something real and organic to Singapore can spur more people to think of it not purely as something lofty and expensive to be indulged in only by the rich and the privileged, but as part of the DNA of everyday life.

And while fashion often draws inspiration from art, it can also have a profound impact on it.

In fact, the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York illustrates that very notion, offering the public a delightful new perspective on some classic and iconic artworks.

Called Impressionism, Fashion And Modernity, the exhibition, which runs till May 27, has been receiving rave reviews for placing familiar loved works in a completely new context.

Masterpieces by Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Georges Seurat are seen through a fashion-tinged loupe, with the emphasis on the period gowns and accessories depicted in the art.

The Impressionist masters functioned almost like street-style photographers today, chronicling the fashions of the day in their paintings.

In fact, The Sartorialist, Scott Schuman, in a YouTube video about the exhibition, even compares the young woman in Degas' The Millinery Shop to a young woman today making ironic T-shirts in a little shop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The paintings also fill out the historical details in Parisian society in the mid-19th century. In particular, they chart the rise of not only commercial fashion in the form of department stores, illustrated fashion magazines and ready-to-wear clothing; but also of the couture fashion house.

Fashion was so fascinating and alluring that poet Stephane Mallarme even created a fashion magazine, called La Derniere Mode, in 1847, which he wrote, edited and designed. The eight issues that he produced contained fashion news, book and theatre essays, notes on food and even dress designs, all under flamboyant pseudonyms, including Marguerite de Ponty and MissSatin.

All this is quite a refreshing eye-opener, considering the accepted norm is for fashion designers to be influenced by art, rather than for artists to be inspired by fashion.

But artists have been inspired by fashion for a long time. And the fashion medium has offered many artists an alternative means of expression.

In another ongoing exhibition, this one at London's National Portrait Gallery, also until May 27, the revolutionary photographic techniques of Man Ray, one of the leading artists of the Surrealist movement, are showcased through more than 150 vintage prints from 1916 to 1968.

The exhibition, titled Man Ray Portraits, features his famous shots of icons such as Marcel Duchamp and Coco Chanel, as well as his fashion photography for publications such as Vanity Fair. In one of his last assignments, for London's The Sunday Times, he photographed a young Catherine Deneuve, wearing huge gold-plated earrings that eventually sold at Sotheby's for US$20,000.

Man Ray never felt that lines had to be drawn between fashion, art and life. Neither did the Impressionists. But, sadly, many people still do.

It is interesting to note that both The New York Times and the New Yorker began their glowing reviews of the Met exhibition by first apologising for its title.

The New York Times said the juxtapostion of fashion with Impressionism sounds like a "double dose of pandering"; while the New Yorker said it suggests "box office candy".

Their qualifiers are clearly meant to allay any suspicions that the curators are scraping the bottom of the barrel by throwing fashion in as a sugary cream puff of an excuse to lure the shallow and the weak.

Similarly, in Singapore, fashion is regarded with some disdain as a trifle, or as the dangerous siren call of a consumerist culture. It is time we treated it with some respect. If it was good enough for Manet and Man Ray, it's certainly good enough for you.

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