8 Artists to Inspire LFW Designers

Jason Wu cited KAWS, going one step further by collaborating with the graffiti artist on a black-and-white flower-petal print that ran through the collection. At Rodarte, Kate and Laura Mulleavy played Vincent Van Gogh’s sunflowers and starry nights across ‘50s prom dresses in an homage to the postimpressionist’s pigments and gestures.

Which got us thinking: which artists would we like London designers to reference in their S/S ’12 collections? Some pairings sprang to mind immediately—Meadham Kirchhoff’s disaffected school girls could have ambled right out of a Diane Arbus photograph—while other designers required more oblique partnerings.

A wealth of London gallery and museum exhibitions supported our creative matchmaking. So it was that we decided (entirely subjectively) that Roksanda Ilincic’s designs share a sculptural feel with the work of Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose work is installed at the Serpentine Gallery; and that Josiah McElheny’s abstract, mirror-refracted videos (on show at the Whitechapel Gallery) might inform the digital print work of Peter Pilotto.

Giles Deacon’s spiders could be seen to owe a debt to Louise Bourgeois’s Maman; Ashish Gupta and Ai Weiwei both subvert modern culture by making emblem