Isn’t it about time fashion is considered art?

During the past decade fashion has become a traffic driver to the world’s most prominent art institutions. Although Diana Vreeland in 1983 organized a retrospective at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Yves Saint Laurent, the first living fashion designer to receive such an honor, fashion’s blockbuster reign didn't truly begin until 2011, the same year that the New York Times questioned the presence of fashion in a museum in an article entitled “Gone Global, Fashion as Art?” It was the year the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a retrospective of the work of the designer who died by suicide the previous year. It attracted 661,509 visitors, before heading off to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum where it also proved to be a runaway success. Ever since, each May, the Met under Andrew Bolton with the support of trustee and Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, has conceived of increasingly grander fashion spectacles such as China Through The Looking Glass in 2015, and Manus x Machina; Fashion in the Age of Technology in 2017. In 2018 they added God and struck box-office gold with Heavenly Bodies, Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, the most visited exhibition in the museum’s 148 year history, attracting over 1.6 million visitors during its five-month run. In less than two months from now it will hope to pull off another victory with About Time: Fashion and Duration, a reflection on how dress reflects the spirit of the times. So isn’t it about time fashion gained the prestige of other art forms such as painting or sculpture?