High Art On The High Street

BBC Is the emergence of high art on the high street just a passing fad?

No, says fashion guru Caryn Franklin:

"I think fashion and art has always mixed. At the end of the day, fashion is very much a barometer of what’s going on culturally and certainly in the Sixties, art made an enormous impact on the fashion industry. A designer like Yves Saint Laurent created ready to wear clothes by linking up with popular culture and offering designs that were actually much more user-friendly. And it seems that certainly over the years, designers will have love affairs with various artists and allow them to inspire perhaps their fabric designs or their cuts - their way of doing things, their use of colour. So for me it is crucial that fashion is open to all sorts of cultural influences.

Design and art and fashion all do go together. At the end of the day, fashion is a business and sellers, to a certain extent, bribe people to come in with interesting experiences. But they rely on differentiating themselves by using different environments, offering different things to make that person want to commit a certain sort amount of loyalty or of money to them because of the experience they understand they’ll get, so in one shop they might get the minimalist, clean and serene experience which conforms with the needs for their life at that time or in another they might actually get perhaps a price bribe, something where they know they’re stacked high, and they’re going to get lots of garments for their money and there’s going to be a real market place feeling. At the end of the day, consumers choose what they want."