Marina Abramović is Now Art Directing for Givenchy

Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images North America

Performance artist and art world celebrity Marina Abramović will collaborate with French fashion house Givenchy‘s creative director, Riccardo Tisci, on his spring New York fashion show, WWD reports.

It’s not the artist’s first big-name collaboration.

The move from showing the collection in Paris to New York comes at a significant time for the LVMH-owned fashion house. This fall, the company will unveil a 5,000 square-foot flagship store in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The 747 Madison avenue location has been home to several other high-end fashion houses including Valentino and Alexander McQueen.

The show, which will be art directed by Abramović, is set to debut on September 11. Tisci told WWD, “It’s a delicate day for America, and so the show is going to be a celebration of family and love.” The designer, who as a teenager was an avid collector of American flags, often pays homage to Americana and popular US styles in his collections.

Although Tisci disclosed he would be working with Abramović, further details of the artist’s involvement were not revealed. “She’s going to help me to art direct the show. It’s going to be very interesting,” he said.

2012 documentary directed by Matthew Akers about Abramović’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art featured a scene of the artist with Tisci at the label’s haute couture offices in Paris. It was there, at Givenchy, where she explained how she rose from the ashes of l’affaire Ulay to begin as a solo artist.

In the film, Abramović said of her transition after splitting with her longtime partner and collaborator, “It was then that I said, ‘Oh god, I really like fashion.’ It was a kind of secret desire.”


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