Art and fashion has always had a strange love-hate relationship. For some artists, fashion meant commerce and that was far beyond their aesthetic principles. And some fashion designers were somehow reluctant to work together with artists because of their unwillingness to make any kind of compromise. Nevertheless, artists have aligned themselves with luxury brands since the 1930s at least, when the influential designer Elsa Schiaparelli started her collaboration with surrealist artists like Alberto Giacomelli or Salvador Dalí, who placed a lobster graphic on a white dress designed by her, or made for her hats resembling a giant shoe and another one a giant lamb chop.

But it was during the 1960s, when the pop artists mimed fashion marketing strategies for their own artistic agenda – Andy Warhol was the master of self-branding; that the playful relationship started taking another direction. Art and fashion started to take one another more seriously and see the potential for mutual benefit. In the last several years the gap between the two has become much more diffused, the clear dividing line between culture and commerce that existed has practically evaporated in a cross-dressing celebratory game of fashion magazines making art issues or museums selling designers’ bags. Art sells and the fashion business sells. Art is on fashion.

Art is on fashion and fashion is on art, or so thinks the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles (MOCA), with the current retrospective of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. And just beside his cartoon-like visions in countless paintings and sculptures is a luxury store operated by Louis Vuitton. The 1,000-square-foot island of commerce inside the Museum sells handbags designed by Marc Jacobs, the Vuitton creative director, with the company’s monogram, and bags with Murakami’s colorful images.

For Marc Jacobs this exhibition shows how “the art world and fashion world working together can create a landscape of this actual world we are living in”. For the Museum’s curators is a good chance to “push the boundaries” and attract an audience and for Murakami it is a perfect way of playing with the pop legacy he is so fond of. It’s no coincidence that his show is entitled “© Murakami”.

It was also a Warholian link that brought the English artist Damien Hirst to make his first step into fashion in collaboration with Levi Strauss & Co. After seeing part of the Warhol Factory X Levi's label at Barneys New York last year, Hirst contacted the label's creative director, Adrian Nyman to buy the entire collection because he felt totally excited with their use of Warhol´s imagery, specially his electric chair picture. This ended up in Hirst designing a new collection for the label and that made its premiere during NY fashion week in September at the famed Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. A collection that includes T-shirts with overlapping images from Warhol's and Hirst's artworks together with jeans based on a design by Hirst in which he cut up two vintage pairs of Levi's 501s, added extra zippers for a bondage look and reassembled them, which goes for $375. A perfect move for the most expensive living artist for whom publicity and provocation are main artistic strategies. (Hirst has just sold a platinum skull, studded with 8,601 diamonds to an investment group for $100 million in one of the most spectacular art deals of the century). And for Levi's it means putting the names of two of the most talked about artists of the last thirty years in a single brand.

Damien Hirst and Levi's

In another truly successful designer/artist match, it was the admiration that Nicolas Ghesquière, head designer of Balenciaga, had of Cindy Sherman’s work that brought her “monstrously human” pictures to the last August French edition of Vogue. The artist accepted to play once again with her photographic “self-portraits” and freely appropriated the Balenciaga wardrobe to compose a series of images that nobody in his right mind would have associated with the sleepy perfection that the Balenciaga house exuded until some years ago. But Ghesquière’s interest in contemporary art goes even further. He’s even hired the French avant-garde artist Dominique Gonzales-Foerster to co design the Balenciaga boutique that is to be placed next to the former Dia Art Center in New York’s Chelsea district.

Cindy Sherman for Vogue

Watchful of all this matchmaking and the hype surrounding the art scene, W magazine has published in its November edition an “art-issue”. With nine different covers by Richard Prince (currently having a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in NY) with fake autographed pics from celebrities like Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston in what looks like a wink to the legendary magazine Interview, founded by Warhol in the seventies and that proposed a unique blend of art, fashion and celebrity cult. With features on Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Matthew Barney or Paul McCarthy, a collaboration of John Baldessari with photographer Mario Sorrenti, and a series of images that Philip-Lorca Dicorcia made of Marc Jacobs showing the amazing collection of contemporary art that he stores in his Parisian home. “Typical addict behaviour,” said Jacobs. “I just got this bug. I started going to galleries, and I kind of went mad.”

W by Richard Prince

John Baldessari with photographer Mario Sorrenti

Images from Philip-Lorca Dicorcia of Marc Jacobs

The relationship between the art & fashion scenes is going through one of its most prolific swapping periods. Maddening for some, inspiring for others this coupling of fashion and art looks to be here to stay. And I might add that Andy Warhol would be very, very proud.