The “Organza Dinner Dress with Painted Lobster” is probably one of the earliest collaborations between a fashion designer and an artist. Designed by Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, this quirky, yet elegant piece is the result of a fruitful collaboration between these two creative minds. Worn by Wallis Simpson for a Voguespread in 1937,  the dress is considered to be one of the most iconic garments of that era.

Dubbed as “monster bags” by some critics, this accessory line was designed by Tracey Emin in collaboration with Longchamp, a bag company. Coinciding with their 10th anniversary, the French luxury brand invited the British artist to design a bag collection that featured some of her signature techniques, like patchwork, destroyed textiles, and painting. Drawing from Emin’s confessional work, the designer bags were linked to a love story, in which a woman would travel from one city to another in search of an “international love”.

For the Spring/Summer 2008 Louis Vuitton collection, Marc Jacobs and Richard Prince decided to bring the artist’s recent iconography to life. A nod to his famous Nurse paintings, the models walked down the runway dressed in see-through nurse dresses. Other references to Prince’s art were worked into the LV bags – a coup that had previously proven successful with the famous Takashi Murakami x LV bag collection, as we will see in the following.

From dressing her performers in Gucci bikinis to collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Vanessa Beecroft was no stranger to the fashion world when Kanye West invited her to collaborate with him on his Season 3 Yeezy collection in 2016. Together they staged a performance for the Yeezy runway show, which showcased hundreds of performers dressed in West’s uniform like designs.

Set against the stunning scenery of the Texas desert, this site-specific installation is Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s ironic take on luxury shopping. Echoing the design of Prada stores you can find in the most elegant neighborhoods around the world, the installation, succinctly titled “Prada Marfa”, displays the brand’s Spring/Summer 2005 collection. Since its creation, the piece has become a site of cultural pilgrimage to art lovers, but also victim to repeated vandalism.

It was the shared skull iconography that prompted British fashion house Alexander McQueen to enlist controversial art market star Damien Hirst for a collaboration. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the brand’s iconic skull print scarf, Hirst created a limited edition of 30 designs adapted from his Entomology series. In this collection, the butterflies and insects that populate the artist’s Dante inspired aesthetic are laid out to create Alexander McQueen’s skull motif.

Probably one of the most commercially successful fashion-art collaborations, the 2003 Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami accessory collection revealed the economic potential that arises from a collision between fashion and art. Featuring a colorful LV monogram designed by the Japanese pop-artist, these bags can safely be considered to be some of the most paradigmatic It Bags of the 2000s.

First, their exchange took the form of geometric “duo-collages.” Later, they made abstract tapestries, which fused their interests in applied and non-objective arts, and wooden sculptures, like Eheplastik (Marriage Sculpture)(1937), which mingled abstraction and allusions to their relationship. For other collaborations, they played distinct roles—Taeuber-Arp danced at the opening of the Dada Gallery decked in a costume of Arp’s design, for example. Though their joint efforts were cut short by Taeuber-Arp’s premature death of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943, Arp continued to “collaborate” with his wife even after her passing, cutting up and reconstituting their early “duo-drawings” as fodder for new projects.

Oldenburg’s large, soft sculptures of household items and diner foods changed the course of Pop Art in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until he began collaborating with van Bruggen, in the mid-’70s, that his work took on a monumental scale. Together, Oldenburg and van Bruggen conceived towering public sculptures—15-foot-tall shuttlecocks or a 51-foot-long spoon tipped with a glistening cherry, for instance—that drew on Oldenburg’s penchant for injecting everyday objects with elements of absurdity.

After meeting Warhol in 1980 and being nudged by Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, Jean-Michel Basquiat entered into a collaborative relationship with the artist that lasted until 1985. The products of their relationship showed everything that can be admired and refuted in 1980s Pop art: the paintings sought to dissolve the hierarchy separating street art from fine painting, and to take Hollywood’s aspirations of monumentality to ground level.

Apprehensive at the thought of having his pure artistic work co-opted for decorative or design purposes, Rothko reacted warily when he was commissioned by the Menil family to build a meditative space to fill with his paintings. Although the process was bitter (Rothko clashed with the architect Philip Johnson, and committed suicide before the project was completed), the outcome remains a monument to his creative genius, and attracts 55,000 visitors a year.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are London-based artists whose work combines assemblage, light, shadow and humor. They aggregate objects and debris into self-deprecating works that bridge two realities. 

Photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida

EM&XW