Fashion loves art. It's having a 'moment'. No matter how disparagingly the art community may look upon the style pack, high fashion brands are muscling in on their world, referencing their heroes and borrowing their skills. You've got Phoebe Philo covering her clothes with passionate brush strokes, Miuccia Prada referencing bold street art and Louis Vuitton using their mightly funds to support contemporary art shows. Karl Lagerfeld riffed on all of this with his S/S 14 show, which saw the Grand Palais transformed into a gallery of paintings and sculptures, all made by Lagerfeld himself, naturally.
So it was only a matter of time before the art attack filtered down to the work of the less conceptual designers - those who put fun before ideas. If the dynamic DSquared2 duo were going to champion any artist, you wouldn't expect it to be one with a subtle, cerebral approach or a restricted, muted palette. This is the pair who threw a cocktail-laden pool party to kick of Milan Fashion Week and wear matching outfits whenever in public. Pop Art, with its focus on surface and immediacy, is right up their street.
That said, you'd think that Pop Art would be the easiest art movement in the world to reference - any fool can stick an 'Andy' slogan on a t-shirt, or do a twist on a Campbell's soup can on a sweater - but the duo had still chosen to go slightly off piste. For example, they chose to open their show with haunting audio of sixties it girl and Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick making a somewhat manic call to a hospital worker. Except this was not the real Edie, but Sienna Miller in character as her in the movie flop from 2006 Factory Girl. That's apt - this was Warhol-light, from that confused 'Factory' set to that cheery hodgepodge of references, mimed from both the sixties and the eighties, that furnished the easy, commercial separates.
All in all, there was plenty of product on offer to appeal to the committed DSquared2 shopper. Though, some members of the press felt that the show lacked the sensuality and unbridled silliness that gives other DSquared2 shows their authenticity and excitement. Even a pink pair of speedos, thrown in amongst all the paint splatters, looked straightly asexual. But then the art world is tortuously stuffy.
