From fashion designer to artist

By cultural convention the designer was the couturier who from threads and needles created designs of haute couture and quality. Today, these conventions have become something more substantial and significant, the designer no longer presents himself as a mere subject drawer, a draughtsman of human figures dressed in fine fabrics.

The contemporaneity of his definition blurs and widens the barriers, transforming the reconstruction of patterns into the authority of masterpieces.

Designers have ceased to be simple designers to rise to the rank of artists. The creative directors of large firms no longer seek only to make good collections, but to design cult and reference products that make them have no place in the industry and, also, a place in the history of fashion. The concept and the strength of the message must be powerful, but the current priority is presence and permanence, and this can only be achieved by designing something unique that details its identity and manifests it, and that is also accepted by the rest of the world and makes it its own.

The designers’ new strategy lies in advancement and evolution. Couturiers want to leave behind this bastion, this professional qualification to proclaim themselves artists of the new art, fashion. A new expectation, a new motivation for a profession certainly stagnant in the creation of clothes each season, for each parade; a circular work without end. A society determined by fast fashion, designers want to stop machines, they want to realize and reaffirm themselves in their work, they want the durability of their creations to be greater, for this they are due to the reach of iconicity and that some of their pieces become it.

Couturiers want to leave behind this bastion, this professional qualification to proclaim themselves artists of the new art, fashion. 

In the past, there was no direct search, but today it remains constant in the minds of the most experienced and emerging designers. When Gabrielle Chanel first drew the famous Tweed jacket, gave it shape and created it, she was looking for a social change a new way to dress the female figure without the ties of the corset, her fervent desire was to convey a powerful message, but not to create an iconic piece, but she got it. Yves Saint Laurent’s Modrian dress passed to posterity as a tribute to the painter Serge Poliakoff, today this design is studied in the big fashion schools. Alexander McQueen‘s innovation in his collection “Nº13“, uniting technology and fashion.

Nowadays it seems that everything is done and that no matter how much they offer us everything is invented. For these reasons’ designers have gone from being simple fashion professionals to being artists in the art of clothing. Giving rise to the avant-garde and original creativity must be accompanied by greater recognition, not only of the designers themselves but of the rest of the sector. Today we can talk about fashion artists.