Stella meet Cindy. Sherman meet McCartney: Stella McCartney and Cindy Sherman Show us the New Way to Collaborate

Article by Gabriella Sotiriou

Untitled #609, 2019, by Cindy Sherman, which features a landscape knit sweater and fur-free leopard-print coat from Stella McCartney’s autumn 2016 collection.

In recent years there have been more art/fashion collaborations than you can chuck a stick, sorry I mean your wallet at. McQueen and Hirst, Vuitton and Murakami, Simons and Mapplethorpe to name a very select few. However, the latest collab on the block has a slightly different set of criteria. British designer Stella McCartney has always pushed the envelope, most notably for being a completely vegan brand and its heavy campaigning for the use of planet friendly sustainable materials and processes. This time though she has shaken up the notion of the fashion house and artist collaboration and it’s honestly very refreshing. But I can’t help but ask myself - does it work? 

Rather than merely sticking an iconic image by an artist onto an iconic brands design (yes I’m thinking of that Louis Vuitton x Jeff Koons collection which featured the LV Speedy emblazoned with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa) Stella has done something unusual. So don’t expect to see a ethically sourced knitted jumper featuring one of Sherman’s iconic Film Stills. That’s NOT what these women are about. 

Firstly, unlike many collaborations of seasons past, Sherman is an artist who is very much alive and kicking and therefore making new work (and retains complete authority over what happens to the old stuff). This immediately reduces the opportunity for a brand to slap her photography onto a stretch of leather and then sell it for an eye watering amount of money. Again, Jeff Koons and Louis Vuitton...I’m looking at you. Another example is the very recent Basquiat collection by Coach. Now this is a very strange mix. You’d think that a cool and happenin’ brand like Off White would have been so much more suited to Basquiat’s work but apparently Coach bid the highest price for the collaboration rights. Yet sadly they didn’t trust the sale factor of Basquiat’s work and chickened out at the last minute and decided to outsource. By which I  obviously mean getting JLo to do some classic body popping in a trench coat. Apparently someone very high up at Coach thinks that the choreography from the ‘Jenny from the Block’ music video (ft. a very puzzled looking Ben Afleck) is more likely to encourage a sale then poor Basquiat. But this isn’t about Jennifer Lopez’s body rolls.

 It’s safe to say that Sherman and McCartney are a much more natural pairing than those mentioned (bashed) above. Their coming together to create seems natural and that might be because there is a genuine friendship and great admiration between these two women. It’s also clear that neither side is looking to get a quick buck out of this. In fact there was no business aim for this at all as McCartney says “There was no set outcome or some kind of business purpose...I think that’s why it works.” And I think she’s bang on the money here (or not as the case may be). Instead this meshing together of clothing and art and the ethos’ that come with both is about the process of collaboration and the creation of something new that neither could have done on their own. Which is a good thing because something tells me that a bag with Sherman’s photography blazoned across it would not do too well on the sales floor. Her own exhibition tote bag from London’s National Portrait Gallery didn’t even see her work on the front, opting instead for her name in silver foiled funky font -  much more appealing and much easier to explain then one of her very off the wall portraits. 

At this point, if you're not familiar with Sherman’s work, then I suggest you do a speedy google and you’ll suddenly completely and entirely understand what I’m on about. She basically dresses herself up as different characters using prosthetics, heavy makeup, wigs and clothing. And recently she throws a good pinch of photoshop in there too. The photographs that come out of this process are amazing in that they are convincing but quite unsettling in that they don’t fully and entirely convince you at the same time. And she actually is quite critical of the fashion world and the people within it, creating mocking images of women with stretched plastic looking skin who apparently have a brilliant working relationship with their local cosmetic doctor, women who wear very expensive clothing just for the sake of it resulting in mismatched, frankly ugly outfits. So I think we can all agree that these images don’t make us rush to our local SM store Confessions of a Shopaholic style but there is a certain mysterious quality that makes us look, look again and then look a bit closer. 

Untitled #615, 2019. All clothing from the Stella McCartney spring 2017 menswear collection.

So it does seem strange that McCartney, who is usually one for a rather minimalist aesthetic, should choose such an artist to collaborate with. But it is clear that the designer has a bit of girl crush on the artist. She unashamedly gushes about her, saying to Vanity Fair - “I am just a massive—to say the least, huge—fan...I always sort of bowed down at Cindy’s feet like ‘I worship you!’. So this is definitely not about sales, it’s kind of not even about art. This is about the process of working together and just seeing what happens. Which is really how all art and fashion started in the first place, is it not? And it is honestly quite refreshing to see in one of the most creative industries in the world yet also one that has become completely and entirely dominated by dollar signs...and pound signs...and yen signs… I could go on but I think you get the jist. McCartney and Sherman are going back to basics with apparently low expectations. But the images created by Sherman using McCartney’s archive are somehow very ‘Stella McCartney’. Those clothes do look fantastic and are not overshadowed by the bizarre couples that Sherman transforms herself into. 

This collaboration is thoughtful and thought provoking. It’s not a simple case of ‘oh look I can buy an already expensive designer piece for even more because it’s got a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers on it’ - and thank god for that. This is less about clumsily inserting art into fashion. Instead fashion has been seamlessly and brilliantly inserted into art, reminding us of the artistic quality of clothing and photography simultaneously. It’s brilliant (and honestly the fact that neither of these powerhouses thought that it would be, is so endearing that it makes me love it considerably more). This is genuinely about doing something new, off the wall which as fashion has proven time and time again, works.

In a lot of the image Sherman poses as couples both wearing Stella McCartney in a clear conversation about the portraying and subverting of gender roles. Though this seems a bit, well...done by now, the couples in Sherman’s images look often remarkably the same (a bit like those couples that you know who look like they could be siblings - very strange) suggesting that these lines are becoming increasingly less distinct. Women’s and men’s fashions are moving closer and closer together, something unusual in the fashion world which typically functions on extremes and therefore often falls back to showing hyper mascualine or hyper feminine clothing. But not here! Cindy and Stella are so over this trope and now we are too. Thank you, girls! 

And though I find the images slightly unsettling (congratulations, that is the point) it does make me want some (absolutely all) of these clothes! Maybe they seem more appealing for a normal person when they aren’t shown on someone like Bella Hadid who is at least a whole lot taller or a whole lot slimmer, usually both, than the average person. Maybe seeing them in a way that does not purposefully make them seem elite and unattainable makes them a hundred times more appealing. 

Or maybe I just like the clothes. Either way I think these photographs do exactly what neither woman set out to do and that is make a sale (but not from me. I cannot afford literally any of it. But I’m sure someone, somewhere can).

Untitled #610, 2019. Houndstooth cape and bag from the Stella McCartney autumn 2014 collection, and sweater from the spring 2017 menswear collection.

If you want to see this brand new yet admittedly bizarre collab for yourself then you can view Sherman’s ten large-scale untitled works at New York’s Metro Pictures gallery by appointment...or more likely online at the gallery website.