Jane Rapley OBE has served for 17 years as Dean of Fashion and Textiles at Central Saint Martins, where she helped launch designers such as Alexander McQueen, Matthew Williamson and Stella McCartney.
Jane Rapley OBE has served for 17 years as Dean of Fashion and Textiles at Central Saint Martins, where she helped launch designers such as Alexander McQueen, Matthew Williamson and Stella McCartney. In 2006, she was appointed Head of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, an office she still holds today.
How would you connect fashion to elegance?
Not easily. I think there is some fashion which is elegant and that there is a lot of elegance which has absolutely nothing to do with fashion. Elegant is really manifested by a refinement, and, if we are talking about it in relation to presentation and clothes, it is often a refinement and a distillation of a personal style.
What is the role of history and art history in your conception of fashion?
History is the narrative of any particular society. And in any particular society, there is an element of bodily display, hence clothing, which can be developed into what we now see as fashion. In terms of art history, if you go pre-20th century, art history is the way the visual world has come down to us. And obviously it is a fantastic source of inspiration. The 20th century art practice has radically changed the way of communicating what the society thinks about itself or what the issues are. Fashion parallels that, because what clothing does has actually become a very immediate manifestation of how society, politics, economics evolve. By moving away from strict representation, and even with photography moving to a broad field for representation, art has left a space for fashion to be read and recognised more openly as a comment on society. Probably fifty years ago, people didn’t really talk about it that way – James Laver, perhaps, was a proponent of such a conception of fashion as a way of reading society in a scholarly way.
Would you describe fashion as a language and a discourse, as Barthes did it?
In part yes, in part no. It is an ongoing debate, and it is very healthy that there is a debate.
The word "intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress. Does fashion have a political role? And in which way?
As a generator of politics, probably not. I think it has a role in communicating political debates, whether it is social issues, gender issues, etc. Its key fundamental role is to express what the prevailing issues are in politics, but I don’t think it generates politics in itself.
How would you relate the concept of fashion to the one of style?
If you mean the style of a designer, it is a tricky issue. I think they can morph in and out of each other : when does a style become fashion? The style of a designer can outlive the fashionability of a designer, which is an interesting question in itself. There is another problem that we often debate in education, which is: what is clothing and what is fashion? And again, it is a different end of the debate, but they can morph into each other.
What does fashion have to do with intellectuality ?
How would you define intellectuality? What are the boundaries of intellectuality? For some designers, they operate in what traditionally would be defined as an intellectual process, and there we come back to this debate of art and craft: creation is all about the journey. For some designers, that is easily recognisable. For other designers, they seem to have a less close relationship to a full intellectual process, because they are very instinctive in the way they create, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t an intellectual process going on though.
How can one teach fashion ?
You can teach fashion. What you can’t teach is to be talented. You can teach technical skills, how to create something three-dimensional out of two-dimensional idea. You can enhance an understanding of colour and silhouette. You can teach these transferable skills about how to get people to do what you want them to do, and how to persuade and how to communicate. You can teach students how to enhance their imaginations by filling their mind, by looking. You can teach how to improve what they see when they look at things. But you can’t in the end teach them how to make the decisions about what they choose for themselves. And that’s where the talent lies, the talent of picking, out of what they see, something that they can make into their own recipe.
Central Saint Martins is a college of art and design. Fashion seems to get closer every day to contemporary art. How do you feel about that ?
For years, even before it became Central Saint Martins, the fashion school shared buildings with the art school. So the conceptual thinking that came out of it was very powerful: Saint Martins Fine Arts in the 1960s influenced the thinking approach to creating fashion. There has indeed been a symbiotic relationship between the two of them across the years. For example, in the 1980s designers became very influential, commercially successful and respected in the cultural community – for many years they had been considered an inferior species in the creative world. I think this reversal of fortunes woke up the younger fine artists to the potential of business, media and communication. That’s when the market in young art exploded. There has been a reciprocal influence happening at CSM, from fine arts to fashion, and from fashion to fine arts.
Organised around a regular pattern: in this column each interviewee picks the picture that illustrates their interview, answers six questions that are the same for all contributors and then two more that are designed specifically for them. In two weeks Donatien will be interviewing the artist Maurizio Cattelan.
