I believe that ruminating about the connections between art and fashion will soon lose their main “fashionable” straight novelty. At first sight, everything is intertwined: the ever-changing collections and runway shows that remind us of performance art, retrospectives of glamorous photographers, and couture in museums. But these century-long relations aren’t just about printmaking on bags and dresses. The connection between art and fashion takes various forms: a sense of touch, layering, tension, and competition.

For our exhibition at сцена/szena gallery, we had to think of a new word: “izvkustvo.” Was it a mistake to connect the word “art” and “taste” in the Russian language? “Taste” is a subjective marker of fashion. It means fashion on the territory of contemporary art. Taste becomes a mistake, irony as a thoughtful artistic choice.

Artists in this exhibition can also inherit the instrument to create and translate well-known codes. They can add a silent message to their practice, be it painting, drawing, objects, or video.

Can we call “izvkustvo” a transit space between description and image? For a while, it seemed to be “naive stained-glass”—this is how Barthes described clothing in his “System of Fashion,” on which he worked from 1957 to 1963. The readeIn his work “Systems of Fashion” (1967), Roland Barthes looks at clothing as semiotics and analyzes two of its forms: description and visuals. Clothing showcased in fashion magazines, with writing and photographs, creates a myth that comes before clothing that is worn. Barthes calls this myth “a cobweb of images, explanations, meanings” and “a predecessor, an appetite-inducing substance.” Is this an analogy to taste? He concentrates on verbal components.

Through this logic, clothing that is exhibited in the artworks at the “Izvkustvo” exhibition can be shown as iconographic, formally and harshly equating it to magazine illustrations. Yet artists look at fashion not as pieces of clothing, a manner of dressing, or sartorial style—even if we reference examples of sold items of fashion brands; they use the potential of fashion as language and speech, a testament of time, a closeness to the body, a coordinate system in a space of the aesthetic world order, a system of ways to build a personal and artistic brand. It is propositioned to “take not only doctrinal meanings or concrete conclusions based on studies, but studious findings, trials, and temptations.” This is where “izvkustvo” begins.

Elmira Minkina