Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this
style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the
masses. 28
The analogy between fashion and avant-garde art in the modern period could
be seen at work in Paris in the early twentieth century, where, to quote a recent
study, “certain members of the social and aristocratic elite used their sponsorship
of the avant-garde to distinguish themselves from the more mainstream taste of
new entrants into the art market such as businessmen and professionals.” 29 But
the analogy need not hold so neatly. In particular, in New York during the 1940s
and 1950s, as in Paris, collectors were divided between those interested in the
latest art and the accumulators of established artistic (and economic) values.
Blue-chip collecting was characteristic of the very rich, executives or owners of
significant business enterprises, exercising a taste established, as Deirdre Robson
explains, “by historians and critics and confirmed by the most prestigious dealers.”
30 Avant-garde collecting was associated with relatively restricted means
(which in part dictated the buying of cheaper work). According to Robson, such
collectors came in large numbers from two groups: women, spending inherited
or marital fortunes, and art professionals, predominantly male, like Alfonso
Ossorio. 31 In developing a taste for avant-garde art, collectors with lower degrees
of social and economic power substituted for these what Pierre Bourdieu calls
cultural capital, investments in knowledge and taste making possible a claim to
cultural power and even, as the avant-garde became artistic fashion, huge monetary
returns on small investments.
Beaton’s pictures associated expensive dresses with as yet relatively inexpensive
art that by 1951 had begun to receive recognition within the art world. If they
thus suggested a potentially elevated social status for Pollock’s work, they also
linked the gowns to the newness and originality that—in the context of the postwar
political and economic order—American fashion, like American art, was
claiming in relation to Paris, since the nineteenth century the international capital
of fashion and art alike. 32 This linkage of avant-garde and fashion, as exemplars
of the American and the new, posed, as Clark recognizes, a direct challenge to the
claim of art to transcend its social context, whether that transcendence be
described as spiritual ascendance, as in nineteenth-century aestheticism, or as
crypto-political negation, as left modernists like Adorno and Clark would have it.
28 Ibid., p. 299.
29 A. Deirdre Robson, Prestige, Profit, and Pleasure: The Market for Modern Art in New York in the 1940s
and 1950s (New York: Garland, 1995), p. 257.
30 Ibid., p. 153.
31 Ibid., pp. 197 ff.
32 It is interesting to contrast these images with another set that Beaton shot to illustrate “Atmosphere
story: airy nightdresses” in the same issue of Vogue, which set sleepwear in a traditionalizing
(though equally American) context of quilts and framed old-fashioned paintings.
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