Fashion as cultural intertextuality: Dior and Kenny Scharf

The long-time history of close collaboration of fashion and art is witnessing a revival. The author studies the phenomenon through the example of a recently unveiled Dior fashion collection, considering pieces of art and fashion as “texts”, which can be disassembled into fragments. By using a certain fragment-“quotation” from a painting, the designer finds in it a ready-made embodiment of his own idea or experience, which implements intertextuality, one of the core features of the postmodernism esthetics. Intertextuality absorbs the whole cultural and historical experience of a person. In a new context, a piece of a painting expands its meanings by becoming the emotional center of a piece of clothing or an accessory and enhancing its esthetic value. When presenting the collection, the designer creates a reality-fantasy, entertains and involves the viewer into his space by keeping the viewer’s freedom to interpret the looks with the quoted images via cultural intertextuality.