Wearable art, also known as Artwear or "art to wear", refers to individually designed pieces of handmade clothing or jewellery created as fine or expressive art. While the making of any article of clothing or other wearable object typically involves aesthetic considerations, the term wearable art implies that the work is intended to be accepted as a serious and unique artistic creation or statement. Pieces may be sold and/or exhibited. The modern idea of wearable art seems to have surfaced more than once in various forms. Marbeth Schon's book on modernist jewellery refers to a "wearable art movement" spanning roughly the years 1930 to 1960. A 2003 The New York Times review of a book on knitting refers to "the 60s Art to Wear movement". Most wearable art is made of fibrous materials and constitutes therefore a branch of the wider field of fiber art, which includes both wearable and non-wearable forms of art using fabric and other fiber products. Wearable art as an artistic domain can also include jewelry, or clothing made from non-fiber materials such as leather, plastic sheeting, metals, etc.
Some 20th-century modern artists and architects sought to elevate bodily ornamentation — that is, jewellery — to the level of fine art and original design, rather than mere decoration, craft production of traditional designs, or conventional settings for showing off expensive stones or precious metals. In Modernist Jewelry 1930-1960: The Wearable Art Movement, author Marbeth Schon explores unique and innovative wearable art objects created by surrealists, cubists, abstract expressionists, and other modernist artists working in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Extreme examples
Not all garments created as wearable art are made from traditional fibers or fabrics, and not all such artworks are meant for ordinary, practical use. Performance and conceptual artists have sometimes produced examples which are more provocative than useful. Trashion is another branch of extraordinary wearable art, for example, work by Marina DeBris. The Portland Oregon Trashion Collective, Junk to Funk, has been using creating outrageous art garments out of trash. A well-known example is the Electric Dress, a ceremonial wedding kimono-like costume consisting mostly of variously colored electrified and painted light bulbs, enmeshed in a tangle of wires, created in 1956 by the Japanese Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka. This extreme garment was something like a stage costume. Not really wearable in an everyday, practical sense, it functioned rather as part of a daring work of performance art. In Nam June Paik's 1969 performance piece called TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Charlotte Moorman played a cello while wearing a brassiere made of two small operating television sets. Canadian artist Andrea Vander Kooij created a group of pieces called Garments for Forced Intimacy. According to an essay at Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts gallery website, these hand-knit articles of clothing are designed to be worn by two people simultaneously, and they, "as the name states, compel the wearers into uncharacteristic proximity." As wearable computing technology develops, increasingly miniaturized and stylized equipment is starting to blend with wearable art esthetics. Low-power mobile computing allows light-emitting and color-changing flexible materials and high-tech fabrics to be used in complex and subtle ways. Some practitioners of the Steampunk movement have produced elaborate costumes and accessories which incorporate a pseudo-Victorian style with modern technology and materials. Some artists, like Isamaya Ffrench and Damselfrau, create experimental masks as wearable art, using materials from Lego bricks ; plastic trinkets, antique hear wreaths and old laces.
