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FASHION & ART

It makes sense that any eye for aesthetics would translate into an eye for style. These 12 artists, designers, photographers, and personalities are living links between the worlds of fashion and art.

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Peter Kramer / Getty Images,Peter Kramer
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Rachel Feinstein has earned her fame as a talented sculptor and painter, showing at Marianne Boesky in the 2000s (Feinstein’s husband is the artist John Currin). During London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2007, she did a special project for Marc Jacobs, became one of Jacobs’ muses, and eventually he featured her in a print ad campaign. Just this Sunday, Feinstein hit the runway for Tom Ford’s major comeback during New York Fashion Week, with Ford joking that his “blood-orange” suit on Feinstein would be further inspiration for Currin (pictures supposedly won’t surface til January 2011).

Peter Kramer / Getty Images
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Louis Vuitton, the 156-year-old French fashion house, has kept its 156-year-old brand fresh by collaborating with popular artists on designs, notably on handbags, and mostly thanks to Creative Director Marc Jacobs, who was appointed in 1997. Jacobs asked graffiti artist Stephen Sprouse to help out in 2000, and the line boomed. In 2003, Takashi Murakami’s Vuitton’ed anime eyeballs and flowers became so popular that Canal Street was replete with knockoffs. And in 2007 LV collaborated with Richard Prince on a series of Spring 2008 handbags .

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Photographer, filmmaker and MacArthur-certified genius Cindy Sherman has an interesting relationship with couture. Sherman is known for having transformed herself in self-portraits, impersonating fashionistas in designer labels. In reference to appearing in an upcoming spread in Pop magazine wearing Chanel, she told WWD: “The dresses were so unbelievably tight on me …Some of the scowls that are on my face were also because I was just so pissed off that these goddamn designers make things so small that even a normal-sized woman can’t fit into them..” For this year’s Fashion’s Night Out Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director of Balenciaga, will host the debut of Cindy Sherman: Untitled (Balenciaga), a six-portrait series dedicated to the artist in which she appears as various characters wearing only pieces from the label.

Evan Agostini / AP Photo
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China Chow, the daughter of the famous Mr. [Michael] Chow and onetime Bond girl Tina Chow, has modeled for Tommy Hilfiger, the Gap, and Calvin Klein, and acted in movies like the 1998 action-comedy The Big Hit and the 2001 film Head Over Heels. Now, as the host of Bravo’s hit show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, in which she appears in a range of avant garde and couture outfits, Chow’s gaining notoriety for her work in the art world, too.

Evan Agostini / AP Photo
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Polarizing British artist and Charles Saatchi darling Damien Hirst is known for his fascination with morbidity and his lurid sculptures (formaldehyde-cased dead animals, a diamond-encrusted human skull). Those who have called out Hirst as pretentious were surprised to learn that in 2008 he collaborated with the decidedly unpretentious apparel company, Levi Strauss, to design what he called “art you can wear." True to form, however, Hirst stayed within familiar territory for his first foray into fashion design, emblazoning t-shirts with skulls and spots and affixing a pair of jeans with small crystal skulls.

Herbert Knosowski / AP Photo
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Famed American photographer Nan Goldin, known for her gritty aesthetic in capturing sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, partnered with fashion brand Scanlan & Theodore for their Spring 2010 Lookbook. Goldin hand-picked bad-girl supermodel Erin Wasson to sit for her. Said Gary Theodore, one half of the label’s duo, “I think fashion can be considered as vacuous. Real situations are what we strive for." The collaboration was not the first time the Aussie brand explored the nexus of fashion and fine art: Scanlan & Theodore has had David Armstrong shoot Karl Lagerfeld’s muse Joana Preiss, and for the label’s 10th anniversary the pair brought in controversial photographer Bill Henson to document the company’s first decade.

Jacques Brinon / AP Photo
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Multi-purpose space The Prada Transformer in Seoul, South Korea, is a decidedly slippery building, an artistic statement in its own right. Funded by the Italian fashion house Prada, the structure can be manipulated to take up to four different apparent forms and shapes. In 2009 The Prada Foundation commissioned Nathalie Djurberg to create work for the space. The Swedish artist is known for her claymation stop-motion films, exploring eroticism and violence with a faux-naïve feel. Djurberg’s installation at the Transformer incorporated sculpture and projections of animated videos.

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Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, the innovative, unstoppable design duo behind the label Proenza Schouler, tapped soap opera satirist (who starred with James Franco on General Hospital) and drag enthusiast Kalup Linzy, a Brooklyn-based performance artist, to help them unveil their Spring ‘10 pre-collection at Pitti W in Florence. For their first time showing a collection in Europe, Hernandez and McCollough went all out, amplifying their runway show with performance art, a sculptural installation and a video featuring Linzy. “We just found his videos really hysterical,” said McCollough.

Mark Mainz / Getty Images; Evan Agostini / AP Photo
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Nowhere is the line between fashion and art grayer than in fashion photography. Juergen Teller has shot for Vogue, W, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times, and worked on ad campaigns for Vivenne Westwood and Marc Jacobs. Juergen’s work has also been included in exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern. Of fashion photography’s typically glossly aesthetic, Teller said “It doesn’t really interest me very much. My work has nothing to do with that...Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy…which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man. She’s so retouched, so airbrushed, without any human response at all, and, well, you don’t really want to fuck a doll.” Sex is virtually synonymous with Terry Richardson, whose graphic sexual content has garnered significant flak in the past.

Karwai Tang / Landov; Evan Agostini / AP Photo
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Helmut Lang started his career as a fashion designer renowned for simple yet elegant designs. Wolfgang Joop is a German fashion designer who founded the companies JOOP! and WUNDERKIND, both of which produce provocative clothing and fragrances. Carlo Brandelli is the designer and creative director for Kilgour. None share much in common, aesthetically speaking, but all have a similar side-interest: sculpture. In fact, for Lang, it’s more than a hobby; he left his label in 2005 so that he could focus full-time on his art projects.

Getty images; AP Photo; Reuters
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Ahn Duong, a French-born actress and model, has posed for the likes of Vogue, Christian Lacroix, and John Galliano, and appeared in movies such as My Best Friend’s Wedding and Scent of a Woman. Now, Duong is a respected New York City painter and sculptor, whose works have appeared in venerated galleries like Sperone Webster and Tony Shafrazi (even her exes are art-world elite: artist Julian Schnabel, furniture dealer Bart Quillen, and auction master Simon de Pury).

Peter Kramer
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Yvonne Force Villareal, president and co-founder of the Art Production Fund, is an art professional known for her bold, wild outfits, which consistently land her on Vogue’s social pages. As she told the Wall Street Journal of her style, “I’m kind of set in my ways. Dolce & Gabbana, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Michael Kors,” though party photos demonstrate her own inspired way of putting outfits together.

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