Surrealisttic approaches in garment design

The fashion system has historically looked to art as asource of inspiration and thegreater part of this inspiration has been purely visual. However, in recent years, with theadvant of Modern Art and avan-garde approaches, such as surrealism, the formal qualities offashion design has changed a lot.Avan-garde and surrealistic approaches to fashion design are ways of disrupting theorderly evolution of fashion. Surrealistic approach produce designs that are either highlyesoterik or oblique comments on social conditions and gender issues.The purpose of this study was to examine the use of surrealistic appoaches in currenthigh fashion. In this work, the collections of Haute Couture and Ready-to-Wear designers,most influenced by Surrealism have been surveyed and analysed. These designercollections appearing on style.com, firstview.com and wgsn-edu.com from SS 2000 to SS2006 served as the dataset. A supporting visual analysis of each selected collection withinthe dataset was also conducted. Among this dataset of one hundred sixty fashion labels,nine were found to have engaged in the use of surrealistic approach in their fashion design.