Costumes: Patterns and Prints

Fashion designers offer shirts, dresses, sweaters, and jackets in a wide array of patterns and prints. Many are black and white, some muted in tone, while others display brilliant color. Abstract fields, geometric grids, dots, squares and lozenges abound as well as identifiable images from the world of art and graphic design. As a photographer, Zucchi recognizes the endless possibilities these variations present when juxtaposed with appropriate paintings and photographs.

A straightforward example is the young man in a red polka-dotted sweatshirt standing before a similarly orchestrated pattern delineated in the work by Niele Toroni (fig. 253). Zucchi reveals a comparable relationship between a woman in a black-and-white checked coat and Alan Shields’s sewing-machine stitched, three-dimensional painting (471). Visual parallels become more difficult when a costume is asymmetrical, as in the figure standing in front of a work by Piotr Uklanski (fig. 367). Here, Zucchi combines the bold black dots of the right side of the jacket with the black spots on the lower canvas, the denser black of the left side, and the compact patterns seen above.

Costume textures are an essential component in Zucchi’s visual analogies. The young woman wearing the cabled woolen sweater provides the artist with an impeccable monochrome foil for the cardboard and ash construction by Anne and Patrick Poirier (fig. 425).  The black and white garment of the young woman in front of the Vik Muniz photograph functions in a like manner (fig. 383). Zucchi uses color and texture together to connect a blonde woman in a rich velvet shawl to the tulips fields in a Robert Longo work (fig. 188). 

Floral patterns have a long-established history in fashion design. It comes as no surprise that Zucchi finds parallels between flower imagery and paintings of gardens, as in the waterlilies of Claude Monet (fig. 262) or the paintings of his contemporary Édouard Muller (fig. 264).

The popular market for outfits that reproduce famous works of art plays to Zucchi’s advantage, but he rarely employs this strategy. An exception is the young woman dressed in a Picasso-inspired jacket posed in front of Ronnie Cutrone’s collage of pictures (fig. 423). In a similar vein, it seems almost too easy for Zucchi to find the analogies between fashion and abstract expressionist works of Jackson Pollock (fig. 396) and Mark Grotjahn (fig. 286).  Zucchi is more drawn to the interplay between repeated colors and decorations of costume and comparable tones and patterns found in paintings by Fernand Léger (fig. 267), Emilio Vedova (fig. 422), and Andy Warhol (fig. 184).