Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion

Chris Townsend

Softcover | 22 x 1.4 x 25.4  | 176 pp

Thames & Hudson | 2002 | 9780500283837

Rapture surveys the collision of two glamorous and fascinating worlds: art and fashion. Whether covering an art installation in a SoHo boutique, Cindy Sherman's complicity with the tools of mass media or a Keith Haring image advertising a hip brand of vodka, and whether describing clothes as metaphor or sculpture, the use of street-art graffiti on a Louis Vuitton bag or Tracey Emin as Vivienne Westwood's model, author Chris Townsend shows how the alluring, illusory faces of fashion and art are fused.

Raising questions about identity, style, culture, commerce and beauty, this volume reveals the ambivalent relationship between art and fashion and shows the visual results as artists both succumb to fashion's powerful lure and at the same time recoil from it.

The images present a mix of art forms: installations, performance art, film stills, sculpture, photography, collage and drawing, plus catwalk shots, advertising images, architectural views of galleries and fashion stores. And the artists covered range from the iconic - Helmut Newman, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Duggie Fields - to the up-and-comers of the New York art scene - Eliza Jimenez, Karen Kilimnick, Judith Shea, Maureen Connor - as well as the Brit Pack - Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marc Quinn, Georgina Starr.

This is the catalogue of an exhibition at the Barbican, London in 2002