In her glossy coffee table book Art to Wear (1986), Julie Schafler Dale combined her passion for art, fashion, textiles and costume to show us a range of wearable clothing.
Dale opened Julie: Artisan’s Gallery (1973 – 2013) on Madison Avenue in New York City to showcase art as wearable fashion and carry many of her one-off wearable items. Through her gallery installations and rotating window displays, she gave visibility to the Art to Wear movement.
“Every day was like Christmas,” she recalled in 2020. “People who I had never laid eyes on before came in with black garbage bags and out came these extraordinary things. My mandate was: do the piece you always wanted to do, not the piece that’s going to sell tomorrow. The priority was totally reversed.”
As part of the Off the Wall: American Art to Wear (202) exhibition at Philadelphia Museum, Document Journal sat down with the designer.
Dale, who had a longtime interest in the art of body adornment, approached the American Craft Council with a pivotal question: were there any artists using clothing to express themselves? They gave her access to slide files and catalogues of work made by artists across the country who were painting and sculpting with fabrics and fibers, and using the body as armature.
“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Dale recalls. Though the pieces were wearable, it wasn’t fashion. It was wearable art, an entirely new form pioneered by a generation who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s. “It was made by people who had something to say, who cared about the world around them and who were trying to make a difference,” says Dale. “The idea was to get art off the walls and out of museums and into our daily lives”.
“Every one of those pieces has a personal story, and as you dive in you realize how intimate they were and how the cathartic the journeys were in terms of creativity. They are chunks of a lifetime.”
– Julie Schafler Dale
In 202o, Julie says down with PBS to talk about the making of her terrific book:
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