Piper McDonald

The fashion system and the art world have traditionally been viewed in reductive, binary terms arising from perspectives that overlook the complexity of the relationship as it has evolved throughout history. The dynamics of this relationship often change when examined through the lens of the magazine, where their discourses can be both challenged and reinterpreted through strategies of representation and context. In this thesis, I begin by tracing a trajectory of moments when the fashion system and the art world interacted in historical and contemporary magazines like La Dernière Mode, La Gazette du Bon Ton, Artforum, and Purple Prose. In so doing, I aim to unpack and question the layers and hierarchies of values which have been assumed to be inherent to their relationship with one another. A deeper analysis of case studies from the fashion magazine L’Officiel and the art magazine L’Officiel Art is then used to reveal the dialogic and dialectic forces at work in the construction of this relationship. This analysis demonstrates that rather than functioning within a strict binary, their interactions, actors, and other elements most often oscillate between the fashion system and the art world, reflecting the complexity of this ever-evolving relationship. The dynamics of the relationship between these two fields have already inspired a substantial amount of academic literature in fashion studies, to which this thesis is a contribution.