One of the most famous meeting points between fashion and art was with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. “I am madly in love with myself,” he said, “I live only to pose.” Pictured above with his friend Coco Chanel, Dalí found he was more accepted by the fashion/society circles than the artistic/intellectual ones, who criticised his perceived exhibitionism, vanity and love of publicity.

He dressed with exceptional care and expense, and his instantly recognisable self-image (that moustache!) was intrinsic to his fame. He had a lifelong obsession with sexual ambiguity and often experimented with cross-dressing; a favorite combination being a silk blouse with pearls. He saw fashion as offering possibilities for escape, transformation and creative aesthetic play. He also collaborated with his friend, the celebrated couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, (left) on a number of surrealistic fashion creations.

Even today many continue to assert that the thing we call ‘art’ does not include the realm of fashion. Fashion is at times classified ‘design’ or ‘craft’ rather than ‘art for art’s sake’, but this is a very Western notion. In other cultures, like much of Asia, such a dichotomy does not exist. Before the Meiji restoration in Japan, the best approximation of the word ‘art’ was katachi, which actually translates to ‘form and design’. While art in the West attempts to destroy or differentiate from everydayness, the equivalent in Japan is something more synonymous with function and life.

Since their reign in the 1980s, avant-garde Japanese fashion designers like Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, and Yohji Yamamoto have been hailed by many (especially in their home country) as artists. But ambiguity remains. While the (somewhat controversial) February 1982 cover of Artforum magazine featured a sculptural Miyake creation, he disclaims the role of the artist: “Fashion design is not art. I don’t think it should be considered an art, or I an artist. I am not making clothes to have them displayed in a museum.”

In the West, the fashion designer who has most visibly blurred the boundaries between art and fashion is her holiness Viv Westwood (below). She is said to make the rich look poor and the poor look rich, and her clothes involve experimental techniques that achieve unexpected aesthetic results, transforming the shape of the body and the very meaning of dress. They are as thought provoking as she is, raising questions of etiquette, history, sex, sexuality, gender, politics, ugliness and beauty.

Interestingly, Westwood was once a vehement defender of fashion as an artistic enterprise, but according to this article from the Guardian, she is now saying she ‘disagrees with everything she used to say’. She’s now an anti-consumerist and has written a manifesto called Active Resistance to Propaganda. Structured as a dialogue between such characters as Diogenes the Cynic, Alice, Pinocchio, the Mad Hatter and Aristotle, it calls for people to watch less television, read more books and buy less things. It also mounts an assault on the theory that art is subjective.Active Resistance to Propaganda.

Over the last two decades, fashion has featured increasingly in art galleries, with a number of very successful exhibitions dedicated to the work of single designers or icons. I took this photograph of Westwood’s gold stiletto pumps with multiple tongues at the exhibition of her work in London’s Victoria and Albert. The show toured globally and she enjoyed having her work displayed, but that is not to say she approves of it. “Clothes are to be worn, not stared at in cabinets,” she says.

The justification of the museum is the idea of art’s quality of endurance - a quality that fashion lacks, being by definition something that changes for the sake of change. Jean Cocteau said, “art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time - fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” In the Guardian article, Westwood says that fashion cannot be art because it is ephemeral - she finds it “annoying” that you can design what you consider to be the perfect pair of trousers, and then three seasons later you are required to design another pair.

Some are calling Westwood a sham for shunning consumerism while charging hundreds of dollars for mass-produced commodities carrying her name. But really all she is saying is that people need less than they are told they do, and she wants people to think more actively. She will always believe in dressing well: she says good clothes are life-enhancing and form self-expression and communication. But if I could sit

over earl grey tea and cucumber sandwiches with Dame Westwood I would love to ask her how useful it is to insist on a distinction between ‘fashion’ and ‘art’.

There is the argument about commercialism. Some say that because fashion is a consumerist enterprise it lacks the ‘purity’ of real art. Fashion certainly matters more economically: although there is expensive high-end low-scale production somewhat comparable to the art world, fashion’s employment, industrial production and global trade is far beyond that of the art world. But many fashion designers are less involved with the business strategies behind their work than certain entrepreneurial artists, and art can acquire investment value and store wealth in ways that fashion rarely can - so it’s a slippery distinction.

While art at its best broadens perspectives and provides a sense of connectedness or new possibility; fashion at its worst preys on people’s insecurities and vanities, and makes big profits by churning out uniformity. But fashion has moved from a privilege for the elite to an accessible realm for most, while the art world is by comparison closed and exclusive, requiring a higher degree of education to access it.

Art is not ‘practical’, but neither is fashion. Roland Barthes tells us that beyond protection, modesty and adornment, we dress ourselves to carry out signifying activity: “In reality fashion is never functional, never utilitarian. If women bought dresses only when they needed them, if a society bought clothes only because of wear and tear, there wouldn’t be any fashion.” Indeed, the urge to decorate the body is one of our most primal - according to Thomas Carlyle, the first purpose of clothes “was not warmth or decency, but ornament” and “among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes.”

Fashion designer, performance artist, nightclub sensation and model for the painter Lucien Freud, Leigh Bowery (left) believed that every time he went out, it was a performance. He said “I think of myself as a canvas” and Boy George branded him “art on legs.” His life project was his body, which he distorted and thwarted through the most outrageous self-costuming involving extensions, padding, binding, corsetry, gaffer-taping and piercing. He saw such modification as not only a way of transforming himself but of claiming ownership of his body, which he felt was under constant threat of control from external societal forces.

The most iconic image of him is the one in his orange spot creation, where the large polka dots extend from his jacket, shoes, scarf and trousers to his flesh so that his painted face and hands became one with the clothing. He is his costume, and the ‘natural’ body and ‘constructed’ attire are merged so that his performative self is all there is. He is heroic for putting the banal, beautiful and grotesque side by side, and blurring art, life, performance and fashion. Beyond narcissistic posing, such self-costuming is a public service which exhibits the marvelous in the mundane and shows that art can be made anywhere from anything.