When Art Meets Fashion

[Boats in Sanary Harbor, 1952, Ellsworth Kelly, American, born 1923. Collage. Collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © Ellsworth Kelly.]

[Dree Hemingway, Ellsworth Kelly and Francisco Costa via Calvin Klein's tumblr.]

Back in May when Vogue covered the recent collaboration between master abstractionist Ellsworth Kelly and Calvin Klein's Francisco Costa (a reinterpretation of a super-crisp, way-ahead-of-its-time sleeveless colorblocked dress the painter and WWII vet designed in France in 1952), it was a bit of a revelation to learn that Kelly's original concept predated YSL's Mondrian dress by well over a decade.

Now I'm curious to see if anyone in the audience will ask about Kelly's earlier piece, with its simpler wide bands of color, when Stanford professor Nancy J. Troy visits the High in January to discuss The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian.

While it was Kelly's own vision to translate his art into fashion, Mondrian-inspired shifts, hats and clutches are appropriations of the latter artist's work. Interpretations that began in the 1960s, roughly 20 years after Mondrian's death. These appropriations and how they shape our current perceptions of Mondrian are what fascinate Troy. In a new book scheduled for release February 2014, she looks at his ever-evolving legacy. Although Afterlife is the key word here, Troy does explore the way Mondrian lived and re-imagined his art too, creating interiors like three-dimensional versions of his paintings.