Not long ago I came upon an Instagram post by esteemed illustrator Julie Verhoeven highlighting the term ‘fartster’ – coined by the late photographer Duane Michals – as ‘one who confuses fashion with art.’ I felt a bit targeted, but it seemed timely. While I do not have the cheek of this year’s Met Gala committee to assert that fashion is art, the boundaries that once separated the two fields have softened significantly over the past decade or so.

Fashion designers have long drawn inspiration from art and even formally collaborated with artists, a tradition that traces back (in popular lore, at least) to Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1937 ‘Lobster Dress,’ an A-line silk-organza dinner frock with a giant lobster motif designed by Salvador Dalí. Artists have also long engaged with fashion – as directional dressers, of course, and by creating works that grapple with the charged semantic value of garments by depicting clothed figures, or working with clothing as material. Today, though, the embroilment of fashion and art extends far beyond the surface-level exchange of aesthetic inspirations. The worlds of art and fashion are increasingly thinking in one another’s terms. They are speaking in them, too, by challenging parameters that once made them so distinct.

When designers think like artists

The entanglement is more obvious on the fashion side. This June, in a black-lacquered pagoda installed before the Musée Rodin in Paris, star designer Jonathan Anderson presented his sophomore haute couture collection for Dior as a love letter to Lynda Benglis. The parade of dresses echoed the American sculptor’s most famous material signatures – particularly the undulating concertina crumples, spray-cast in metal, of her ‘Pleated’ series – in twists, drapes, and knots of metallic plissé. Where many such homages stop short at cheap facsimiles of their inspirations, Anderson offered a study in cloth of an artist and their process that lived up to the craft obsession of its referent, bringing sculpture to life on the form. It was a compelling example of a designer not only allowing art and artists to inform their processes, but thinking like an artist, too.

In the best cases, fashion’s keenness to align with art is motivated by genuine interest and a belief in its capability (responsibility, even) to dialogue beyond its own echo chamber. A more cynical view would be that art affords fashion a cachet that it cannot attain alone. Beyond the many fashion-house-funded art foundations and projects around the world, a recently prolific phenomenon is luxury fashion houses staging runway shows centered on ambitious artist commissions. The trend has gathered pace since the late 2010s, spearheaded by creative directors such as Maria Grazia Chiuri during her nine-year tenure at the helm of Dior (now chief creative officer at Fendi), and Demna during his decade-long reinvention of Balenciaga (now creative director at Gucci). From a brand perspective, these installations are centerpieces of a (hopefully) sophisticated cultural marketing strategy – the backdrop for prospective clients’ first impression of a collection.

Wolfson’s campaign – a deliciously uncanny series of images that casts house ambassadors cavorting with menacing, digitally rendered humanoid birds – punchily distills the current logic behind such strategies. Fashion’s vernacular has always relied on a direct, sex sells-style invocation of desire, but today, shooting sun-splashed models on a yacht is as forgettable as an Instagram influencer’s carousel. Essentially, the visual languages that fashion pioneered have become so ubiquitous that the industry has been forced to devise a more sophisticated approach to visual communication to cut through the noise, often enlisting contemporary artists to do so. Whether they are creating campaigns or working for brands as creative consultants, artists’ involvement in the fashion ecosystem has never been quite as extensive or formalized as it is right now.

Art starts speaking fashion’s language

The art world has also never seemed quite as interested in fashion as it does today: Kunsthalles of noble cultural standing are posting as if they were meme accounts, and artists are acting like influencers. Most intriguing are those artists who do not just reproduce, but rather decontextualize and ‘sample’ fashion’s native visual tongues. There are Tenant of Culture’s ghostly sculptures wrought from fashion waste, evoking the complex material and human histories that underpin a garment’s production; CFGNY’s meta-fashion shows that wittily erode the runway’s premise as a forum for the presentation of product; and Sylvie Fleury’s career-long history of displacing fashion objects and ephemera, installing shopping bags on gallery floors and casting Balenciaga knife pumps in bronze. All of these are examples of tactics and processes more typically associated with fashion image production (styling, magazine art direction, and set design among them) being shrewdly deployed in an art world context, and even treated as both subject matter and material.

This is not to say that these works are fashion – even if some of them are pretty trendy. Rather, they exhibit ideas, sensibilities, and strategies that feel incredibly native to fashion – whether consciously or not. This is a crucial point. While it may not even be the artists’ primary or even express intention, to my eye, their subtlety in doing so calls sharp attention to how profoundly fashion conditions our perspectives – or, to be bold, our world.

The future? Less spectacle, more infrastructure

I would love to offer a clean, confident prediction on how the relationship between fashion and art will continue to unfurl, but I really can’t. Both art and fashion are globally networked businesses – even if we discount the economic collateral of the geopolitical precarity that conditions life today, the creative outputs of both industries are the products of and responses to that precarity. But I would wager a decrease in outward-facing collaborations between fashion brands and both art institutions and artists. Notoriously fickle brands will either withdraw from or stave off partnerships that do not promise immediate, quantifiable returns; artists will increasingly recognize the reputational detriment that a poorly positioned brand collaboration can cause.

But that hardly spells the end of the relationship. If anything, I only see it becoming more networked. Both fashion and art have something the other wants, and I can imagine a world in which the already-prevalent movement of experts between the two fields – brands working more closely with artists on art direction, for example, or institutions working with fashion communications specialists to generate greater buzz and extend their reach – will only intensify. After all, while fashion and art will never merge, their dialogue is growing more nuanced. As with any good conversation, it ultimately comes down to the people knowing what they are talking about.