What Do Artists Gain from Fashion Collaborations?

The Spring/Summer 2025 womenswear edition of Paris Fashion Week closed on Tuesday, pausing the fashion industry’s globe-spanning convoy until the start of next year. For the past few seasons, the week’s hotly anticipated coda has been the Miu Miu show, with the house unanimously acclaimed as an apotheosis of contemporary It-girl style. At each of the brand’s shows over the past three years, the context in which the clothes have been presented has been key, with the Palais d’Iéna given over to a woman artist to create a site-specific video installation.

This season, it was the turn of London-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga, who presented Salt Looks Like Sugar (2024), an impressive multi-layered project interrogating notions of truth and its representation. A mechanical printing conveyor carrying issues of The Truthless Times, a fictitious newspaper, snaked across the roof of the rationalist masterpiece. Prefacing the show itself was a film shot in an Oxfordshire printing press depicting a lovers’ tiff between the newspaper’s ostensible publishers. The artist’s intention, a note from the fashion house read, was to present ‘a plurality of elements’ that ‘both [proffer] tools to decipher and dissect the concept of truth, and [underscore] the profusion of information that characterizes contemporary reality’, with similar themes echoed in the collection.

While a striking example of a collaboration between an artist and a fashion house, the novelty of Macuga’s installation lay in its content rather than its context. After all, since the return of in-person fashion shows following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, the transformation of venues into fleeting exhibition spaces has become a keen trend.

The Spring/Summer 2025 season was a bold testament to that with an unprecedented number of brands commissioning site-specific installations – from 16Arlington and Burberry in London to Acne Studios, Courrèges and Dior in Paris. The reasons why are relatively easy to unpack. It’s partially an extension of longstanding patronage models, through which fashion brands’ participation in the art world is predicated on exhibition sponsorships, such as Bottega Veneta’s funding of Alvaro Barrington’s current show at Tate Britain, or the support of institutional curatorial positions, as is the case at Hong Kong’s M+, courtesy of Chanel.

In tandem with fashion’s transformation into a mass cultural phenomenon, patronage of the art world has become an increasingly important means for couture brands to communicate a degree of cultural discernment. A key distinction of the trend towards artist collaborations in the context of fashion shows, however, is that such projects go beyond demonstrating a strong affinity with art through external partnerships. After all, a fashion show is, in crude terms, a very elaborate marketing opportunity, and placing a site-specific commission at its heart is an effective way for a brand to convey its cultural positioning.

Grounds for cynicism are justified – fashion, after all, has a reputation for fickleness, with shameless land grabs for whatever parallel industries it deems ‘hot’ par for the course. What’s more, the fleeting nature of fashion shows – and the fact that their focus will always be the clothes – raises questions about whether such contexts are particularly conducive to meaningful interactions with art.

‘This reach is something I could never have accessed without this infrastructure, and it interests me that it is not solely an art audience’ – SAGG Napoli 

So, what are the primary benefits of such collaborations for artists? Well, generosity of budget is one. Given that artist commissions for fashion shows are typically the preserve of the industry’s larger players, there’s a vested interest in enabling artists to make work with a high production value.

For Sophia Al-Maria, who created Gravity and Grace (2023), a film and installation for Miu Miu’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection, the opportunity allowed her an expanded artistic remit. ‘I’d never had the budget to shoot on film and, frankly, I have given up on making “art films” unless I am doing something on my computer for no money all by myself.’ she explains. ‘In my experience, the funding bodies we have in the art world don’t understand what it costs and how much it takes to “get the shot”. It’s why you end up with so many video artists transitioning to film and television, which has less freedom but a more accurate understanding of labour costs. I’d not worked much in fashion before, so it was actually a positive experience, and I felt much more respect from the team at Miu Miu than in any art-world context.’

That fashion shows should offer such a degree of creative liberty to artists may seem somewhat paradoxical, given their commercial motivation. But artists working within these contexts are freed from creating with commercial viability in mind, since, ultimately, their work isn’t what’s for sale. And, on a simpler level, the creative directors of fashion brands typically choose to work with artists they sincerely admire – as is famously the case with Jonathan Anderson, the incumbent creative director of Loewe, who collaborated with American artist Richard Hawkins on the set for the house’s Autumn/Winter 2024 menswear show. Counter to his initial apprehension that ‘fashion houses claim “collaboration” with artists even when the art is merely the inoffensive, unobstructive set dressing for their catwalks’, Hawkins told me, ‘Jonathan instantly encouraged me to distract and overwhelm as much as I wanted.’

Indeed, the scale of work allowed by the context of a major fashion show is a further boon. As artist SAGG Napoli, who created a vast runway centrepiece and staged a live archery performance for Dior’s most recent show, told me: ‘I’ve never worked on such a large-scale installation with an institution. It allowed me for the first time to test my work’s ability at scale, and also to show institutions that younger artists are able to do such things if afforded the chance.’

‘Showcasing a Muslim femme with a sword tearing down the halls of the French third circle was, frankly, fab’ – Sophia Al-Maria

Beyond enhanced scale and production capacity, another key asset that fashion brands offer is direct access to individuals and source material that would otherwise be impossible to secure. For Hawkins, an artist with an abiding interest in pop culture, working with Loewe proffered access to the house’s roster of A-list male celebrities. ‘Loewe was kind enough to commission new photos – exclusively for my use – from among their brand ambassadors, who include Omar Apollo, Stéphane Bak and Taeyong,’ he says.

Fashion’s intertwinement with the cult of celebrity, the value it places on spectacle and its well-oiled communications infrastructures results in a global reach that few industries can match. Commissioned artists are not only able to present their work to hundreds of thousands of livestream viewers – plus the myriad more that will discover it via print and social media – they’re also given access to means of mass distribution that has fascinating conceptual implications. ‘This reach is something I could never have accessed without this infrastructure, and it interests me that it is not solely an art audience,’ SAGG Napoli muses. ‘Infiltrating wider cultural conversations is a bonus. It’s been very moving to see that the installation and performance inspired both people who knew my practice already, and who didn’t.’

Of course, partnerships between fashion brands and artists aren’t positive by default. For every example of a successful collaboration, there’s another that amounts to little more than a glib exercise in window-dressing. Still, the generous budgets, possibilities of scale, production infrastructures, reach and creative freedom that fashion houses can offer artists are reasons to view the burgeoning transformation of fashion shows into transient exhibition venues with a degree of optimism. As Al-Maria says of her collaboration with Miu Miu: ‘Being able to design invitations which asked the audience, “What happens when you realize you’re not the hero of your own story but the villain in someone else’s?” and showcasing a Muslim femme with a sword tearing down the halls of the French third circle was, frankly, fab. I didn’t do it for the coin. I did it for the learning. And would again.’

^{Main image: Dior, Spring/Summer 25, Paris Fashion Week, 2024. SAGG Napoli, performance documentation. Courtesy: © the artist, Dior and Champ Lacombe Biarritz/London; photograph: Adrien Dirand}