Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion Since 1970

by Chris Townsend

With astonishing acuity and a dazzling array of images, Rapture surveys the collision of two glamorous worlds, art and fashion. Modern icons and iconographers—supermodels, fashion designers, artists, and photographers—have increasingly been crossing boundaries to create new and seductive images for a sophisticated audience. From Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin's inspirational photography of the 1970s, through Kate Moss's recent collaborations with yBas and Nan Goldin for Vogue , to the use of reworked catwalk footage and mutilated magazine images by young artists, this crossover is fertile ground for the creative and the original. Whether covering an art installation in a SoHo boutique, Cindy Sherman's complicity with the tools of mass-media, a Keith Haring image advertising vodka, the use of street-art graffiti on a Louis Vuitton bag, or Tracey Emin as a Vivienne Westwood model, author Chris Townsend shows how the alluring, illusory faces of fashion and art are fused in the new mix. Raising questions about identity, style, culture, commerce, and beauty, this book reveals the ambivalent relationship between art and fashion and shows the spectacular visual results as artists succumb to fashion's powerful lure and at the same time recoil from it. 165 illustrations and photographs, 160 in color.

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2002

Reviews

[Ava Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by my professor. (thanks Bethany). Was going to write a list of Ava’s key takeaways but I think I will be going to sleep instead.