What Artists Wear
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
*A Financial Times Book of the Year*
'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, Guardian
Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are.
In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves.
Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Our clothing is an unspoken language that tells stories of our selves," writes style critic and art curator Porter in this fascinating survey of the fashion habits of artists. Weaving gorgeous photography with archival interviews, Porter unpacks how trailblazing artists, such as Marina Abramović and Louise Bourgeois, wielded their personal styles as tools of subversion and considers how their wardrobes reflected "the conditions in which they made their work." Women artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, for instance, bucked against the historically "encoded meaning of male power" with their defiant tailored suits, while Jean-Michel Basquiat's mismatched pieces, often loose-fitting and covered in paint, spoke his language—"off-kilter, chaos in control"—as they called back to his youth in homeless shelters. Porter also mines the sociopolitical mechanisms of fashion, such as contemporary artist Martine Syms's procuring of "bootleg products" to explore the cultural appropriation of Asian and Black communities, and David Hockney's "expression of queerness through clothing." Inquisitive and insightful, Porter's skillful dissection of the historical context, social commentary, and personal symbolism behind each artist is a pleasure to get lost in, and he makes a spirited case for the power and potential that can be unlocked through the simple act of dressing. Materialism gets a whole new meaning in this perceptive outing.
