What happens when you invite such luminary fashion designers as Stephen Jones or Hussein Chalayan to collaborate with important contemporary artists such as Cerith Wyn Evans or Gavin Turk and ask them to think about the Olympic values of speed, strength, agility and stamina?  A celebration of the best of British creativity and a set of innovative exciting works of art, which will be unveiled at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum for the Festival of London, during the 2012 Olympic Games. 

Cocteau and Chanel, Dali and Schiaparelli: artists and fashion designers have long admired and inspired one another.  And London, perhaps the greatest global capital of creativity, is a place where artists of all kinds congregate, a fertile environment for collaboration.  This project creates a new chapter in that long, rich history, bringing together leaders in their different fields and placing no limits on their imagination.  The artists and designers have risen enthusiastically to the challenge, making sculpture, fantastical garments, video and sound works.

The brainchild of the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Art’s Foundation Britain Creates FASHION AND ART COLLUSION is recorded for posterity in a box which will also include two books, a set of posters of the finished artworks and a CD as one of the collaborations is audio. The books will include visual interviews showing the artists’ and designers’ notes, ideas and rough sketches of their joint creative process as well as their biographies and a second book records their working process with specially commissioned photographs by Gautier Deblonde.. With an introduction by Lucy Yeomans, Editor of Harpers Bazaar. and an essay by Iain R. Webb Professor of Fashion at the Royal College of Art and Central St. Martins College of Art, who has been part of the London art and fashion world for thirty years as designer, stylist, author, teacher, curator and editor.

The pairings are:

Hussein Chalayan & Gavin Turk

Giles Deacon & Jeremy Deller

Stephen Jones & Cerith Wyn Evans

Mary Katranzou & Mark Titchner

Nicholas Kirkwood &Simon Periton

Peter Pilotto & Francis Upritchard

Jonathan Saunders & Jess Flood Paddock

Paul Smith & Charming Baker

Matthew Williamson & Mat Collishaw

Works and artistic pairings curated by Susanna Greeves

Foreword by Lucy Yeomans, Editor, Harpers Bazaar

Essay by Iain R. Webb, designer, writer and fashion historian

Book and box edited by Edward Booth-Clibborn

Designed by the award-winning  Barnbrook Studio