Fashion's 20 Most Memorable Art World References of the Last Century

One of the first designer/artist collaborations of the modern era was between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, two artists who bonded over their love of surrealism. There are many pieces that successfully represent this partnership, including the Lobster Dress, Tears Dress, and Shoe Hat. But the first piece they made together was actually a compact powder case, designed to look like a rotary phone dial.

In 1937, the duo created what is likely their most famous collaborative creation, the Lobster Dress, a silk evening gown featuring a large lobster painted on the skirt, inspired by Dalí’s 1936 piece, Lobster Telephone. The dress was part of the 18-piece trousseau Schiaparelli designed for Wallis Simpson following her marriage to the Duke of Windsor. It is currently on view at the V&A’s Schiaparelli exhibition, cementing its legacy within the designer’s archives.

Dalí was hardly the only artist who worked with Schiaparelli during the height of her career, however. Alberto Giacometti designed a series of brooches and buttons for her, and Christian Bérard, Etienne Drian, and Marcel Vertès all created prints at one time or another.

Yves Saint Laurent was inspired by art at many points throughout his career, but likely his most famous iteration is the line of cocktail dresses based on Piet Mondrian’s geometrical work. In 1965, as part of the autumn/winter collection, Saint Laurent sent 26 Mondrian-like cocktail dresses down the runway. He was inspired by a book his mother gave him for Christmas, Piet Mondrian Sa vie, son œuvre by Michel Seuphor (1956). While the designs looked simple, the technical prowess needed to create the solid colors, black borders, and simple lines while maintaining virtual seamlessness was an impressive feat.

A year later and Saint Laurent’s captivation with art was still in full force, though it pivoted to the world of Pop Art. The designer sent many color-blocked dresses down the runway of his autumn/winter 1966 show, inspired by the movement. He then ended the show with two designs inspired by Tom Wesselmann and the cutout effect used in his work.

There are a few designers who will show up on this list a lot, thanks to their affinity and appreciation for art. Saint Laurent is one of them. He was often looking to the art world for inspiration. In 1979, his eye turned to renowned artist Pablo Picasso, who had just died six years prior.

The designer’s autumn/winter 1979 collection was an homage to Serge Diaghilev, the Russian art critic and founder of Ballets Russes. Diaghilev and Picasso formed a close bond, and Picasso designed the sets and costumes for some of Diaghilev’s ballets. It was specifically the ballet, Parade, presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1917, which Saint Laurent looked toward, and many of the harlequin dresses within the collection come from that reference. But he also pushed further into Picasso’s work, specifically to a 1937 painting, Portrait de Nusch Éluard. Saint Laurent recreated the jacket in the piece and presented it alongside the rest of the Diaghilev collection.

It was a common practice for Saint Laurent to recreate clothing depicted in artwork, just like he did with the jacket in Picasso’s Portrait de Nusch Éluard. In 1981, the designer took a similar approach, sending a handful of hand-painted Romanian folk blouses down the autumn/winter runway, inspired by Henri Matisse, and the clothing illustrated in work like his 1940 painting, La Blouse Roumaine. The style would become a signature for the House, with Saint Laurent, as well as subsequent creative directors, revisiting the top many times over the years.

But Matisse wasn’t the only artist who inspired the autumn/winter 1981 collection. Saint Laurent also looked to cubist artist Fernand Léger, and the designer covered voluminous skirts in colorful cutout shapes reminiscent of both artists’ work.

The spring/summer 1988 season brought with it another YSL collection inspired by a famous artist, this time Vincent Van Gogh. Specifically, the Dutch painter’s famed floral paintings, Irises and Sunflowers. Saint Laurent worked with the Parisian embroidery house Maison Lesage to create these jackets. Each one is impressively intricate—made of pearls, ribbons, sequins, and bugle beads—and took over six hundred hours of work. The Irises jacket alone featured 250,000 sequins in twenty-two colors. In 2019, the Sunflowers jacket—originally modeled by Naomi Campbell on the runway—sold at auction for 382,000 euros, while the Irises version earned 175,500 euros.

But Van Gogh wasn’t even the only artist to be referenced in Saint Laurent’s spring 1988 collection. The designer also showed looks based on works by Georges Braque and his bird paintings.

Gianni Versace had the pleasure of meeting Andy Warhol when he visited New York for the first time and the two became friends. Warhol even made portraits of the late designer, which were once used for invitations to a Versace fashion show and now decorate Donatella Versace’s house.

Gianni is said to have been enamored with Warhol’s media awareness, but he was also a fan of his work. In 1991, Gianni presented a collection of pieces covered in Warhol’s art, specifically portraits of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. The collection was such a hit, one dress from the bunch now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while others are still worn to this day. In 2018, Donatella even brought back the print as part of a tribute collection for her brother.

Vivienne Westwood’s obsession with art extended far beyond a single look or a one-off collection. The designer was especially taken by the London museum, The Wallace Collection, and often looked to its archive for prints. It was the French Rococo painter, François Boucher, though, who seemed to inspire Westwood the most. She first referenced his work at her autumn/winter 1990 show, where she printed Boucher’s 18th-century painting, Daphnis and Chloe, across dresses, corsets, and other articles of clothing. It was known as The Portrait Collection, and it started a movement for the brand, which is now known for these printed corsets. “I wanted the look of a model who'd just stepped out of a portrait,” Westwood said, adding that she chose Boucher, specifically, because his work is so “typical and so pretty.”

Following that collection, Westwood continued to pull inspiration and imagery from The Wallace Collection. During the spring/summer 1993 season, it was time for the painting Hercules and Omphale to have its moment on the runway. She also used Abduction of Europa as well as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swarm of Cherubs and The Swing.

Westwood also produced dresses inspired by pieces in Boucher’s paintings. In her 1995 show, Vive La Cocette, she recreated a gown from Boucher’s 1759 portrait of Madame de Pompadour. She returned to the artist and subject in her fall/winter 2002/2003 collection, designing another—this time more subdued—gown from a 1758 portrait of Madame by Boucher.

To this day, Vivienne Tam’s spring 1995 collection remains one of her most impactful. Dubbed the “Mao Collection,” Tam worked with Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu on a series of t-shirts, dresses, and matching sets featuring Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China and former chairman of the Communist Party of China. The designs are extremely irreverent, with images depicting Mao in ponytails and a frilly collar or smeared with lipstick. It was, of course, a controversial collection, considering its overtly political nature, but it has stood the test of time and is still coveted to this day.

Three years after launching his Pleats Please line in 1993, Issey Miyake introduced the Guest Artist Series where he collaborated with artists on pieces for the collection. The series kicked off with the help of Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura. Known for his reinterpretations of classic art, the works Miyake used in 1996 saw Morimura place himself within Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's 1856 painting, La Source. Possibly the most recognized piece from the collection features an inverted image of Morimura set below the nude from the painting.

The Guest Artist Series would continue on for a few more years, featuring works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson, and Cai Guo Qiang.

A list of fashion’s art world references just wouldn’t be complete without the Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami collection. Six years into his tenure at LV, Marc Jacobs already had two successful artist collaborations under his belt, with Stephen Sprouse in 2001 and Julie Verhoeven in 2002. But when he tapped Japanese artist Murakami to reimagine the classic brand monogram in his style, he hit gold. Murakami created the now iconic candy-colored designs, featuring flowers, cherries, and Murakami’s beloved “Creatures from Planet 66.” The limited-edition collection sold out in just hours and was suddenly on the arms of every It girl, including Mean Girls’s Regina George. Two decades later, and it was time to bring Murakami back into the fold. In 2024, LV released a re-edition of the collection, featuring both old and updated designs, pushing the collaboration even further into belts, sneakers, scarves, wallets, and sunglasses.

If this dress from Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring 2003 couture collection looks familiar, there are likely two reasons. One, because it features scenes from Edgar Degas’s famous ballerina paintings. But you also might recognize it because Chappell Roan wore the dress to the Grammys last year.

One of the most iconic and well-known designer/artist collaborations of the 21st century is undoubtedly the one between Marc Jacobs’s Louis Vuitton and Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Together, the pair created a collection covered in Kusama’s signature polka dots, placing the pattern on everything from dresses to, of course, handbags.

Jacobs initially met Kusama during a trip to Japan in 2006 after admiring the artist's work for years. Their collection, however, wouldn’t come to fruition for six more years until 2012, with its launch coinciding with a number of Kusama exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, sponsored by Louis Vuitton. The collection was a major success, so much so that, in 2023, LV worked with Kusama again on a second one.

Raf Simons has collaborated with many people over the years while designing for his eponymous brand, Calvin Klein, and Dior. He has used the work of Sterling Ruby, Peter De Potter, and Willy Vanderperre on various collections, but it was his designs featuring paintings by Brian Calvin that were the most impactful. Perhaps that’s because Calvin’s work can be unsettling at times. His cubist-adjacent 2D paintings peeked out through a pink jacket, inviting the viewer to come closer, if they dare.

There was a lot of pressure on Pierpaolo Piccioli ahead of the Valentino spring/summer 2017 show. His longtime collaborator, Maria Grazia Chiuri, had left for Dior, and he was on his own for the first time. So, Piccioli turned to medieval art, specifically, the work of Hieronymus Bosch and his triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, for some support. He commissioned designer Zandra Rhodes to create prints based on the work, sending diaphanous, sheer gowns sprinkled with the depictions of paradise down the runway.

Louis Vuitton continued to build on the arty bag legacy started by Jacobs in the 2000s and, in 2017, released a collaboration with American artist Jeff Koons. Surprisingly though, Koons’s own creations were completely missing from the 51-piece collection, which saw classic works of art emblazoned on various LV bags.

Inspired by Koons’s 2015 Gazing Ball series, the collections placed art by Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and more artists on LV’s most popular accessories. If there is any question as to who painted these iconic works, the pieces were then finished off with the artists’ names in large metal letters across the front.

Raf Simons worked with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts on his spring 2018 collection for Calvin Klein. The designer was inspired by horror films, specifically their “depictions of both an American nightmare, and the all-powerful American dream,” as he explained in the show notes. Using graphics from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, Simons printed images of car crashes upon shift dresses and Sandra Brant’s face on tank tops while Brant herself watched from the show’s front row.

In 2017, Rei Kawakubo presented her usually bulbous, avant-garde silhouettes, this time rendered in an array of colorful, eye-catching patterns. Abstract colors, anime, and childlike maps covered the designer’s radical shapes. There was little to no theme among the patterns aside from explosive color, offset by a few all-white ensembles. Two pieces from the collection boasted paintings by 16th-century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for depicting figures with heads made of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and fish. His 1591 portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, called Vertumnus, therefore, fit perfectly as a pattern within the collection.

Throughout his tenure at Moschino, Jeremy Scott often looked to the art world for inspiration, interpreting classic works in extremely literal ways. For Moschino’s spring/summer 2020 collection, Scott turned his gaze toward Pablo Picasso.

Scott managed to represent an impressive amount of Picasso’s oeuvre in the collection. It was truly a night at the museum where works of art came to life and strutted right by you, before returning to their stagnant life. Kaia Gerber walked the runway in a 3D rendering of the 1914 work Guitar, while Bella Hadid was dressed like a harlequin who walked right out of one of the Spanish artist’s paintings. There were references to Girl Before a Mirror (1932) and the larger cubist movement. Models walked through giant gold frames, while some carried them on the runway. There were also matadors and a cubist-adjacent bull mask thanks to milliner Stephen Jones.

Rachel Scott’s most recent collection for Diotima was inspired by the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. In her show notes, Scott wrote that Lam’s “visual language carries a consciousness that resonates deeply with my own.”

The designer worked with Lam’s estate on the collection, using versions of his Femme Cheval paintings as well as the 1943 work Omi Obini. One of the Femme Chevals was rendered in fluffy organza to create a halter dress and maxi skirt, while Omi Obini was desaturated and placed on a jacket and wrap skirt.