The arrival of Surrealism in the United States was, from the outset, intertwined with fashion and fashionability. Even before the first large exhibition of Surrealism stateside at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1931, Frederick Kiesler had proposed surrealist art as exemplary for shop window design in his book "Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display" (1930). Scholars have explored the ambiguity of the fashion-world fanfare that surrounded and even featured in important museum exhibitions in New York, including Salvador Dalí’s meticulously planned art-fashion syntheses and stunts. André Breton famously struggled with the notion of Surrealism as a brand or trademark, especially around the emergent category of the surrealist object, displaying an ongoing ambivalence with regard to the dissemination of surrealist ideas and paving the way for a complex ethics of consumption.
This internal dilemma—often externalized within the history of the movement in the form of expulsions—has made for a double-sided historiography of Surrealism, characterized by an embrace of fashion as a surrealist medium, on one hand, and a distancing tendency that designates fashion as outside of the movement’s defining achievements. In this issue of Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, we seek to explore Surrealism, fashion, and fashionability in both its mainstream and counter-cultural guises, probing the close relationship fostered by Surrealists and surrealist-inspired artists alike with aspects of fashion ranging from aesthetics and philosophy to commercial culture and lifestyle.
Guest Editors: Jennifer R. Cohen and Michael Stone-Richards