8 Chic Art Crossovers From the Runways of Fashion Week

When Clement Greenberg compared the optical flatness of a Jackson Pollock painting to "wallpaper," he couldn’t have anticipated that Vogue magazine would co-opt the splatterings and drips as just that—a background for a commercial fashion shoot—only three years later. But that's the nature of the relationship between the art and fashion worlds, which has only become closer and more explicit in recent years.

Sometimes it's the artist who headlines these aesthetic crossovers—famously, Takashi Murakami lent his anime-derived icons to Louis Vuitton handbags, Yayoi Kusama dabbed her manic polka dots across a Marc Jacobs collection, and Damien Hirst stamped his iconic skulls on Alexander McQueen scarves. Other times, it's the designer who liberally quotes the signature style of classic (and conveniently deceased) artists. Cynical watchers might call these collaborations nothing more than slick branding exercises, but that would miss the fascinating interchange behind their mass appeal.

This Fashion Week in New York, designers have again pillaged modern and contemporary art for inspiration, citing artists from Paul Klee and Alexander Calderto James Siena and Shirin Neshatin their clothes.

Flip through the slideshow above to see the translation of fine art to the catwalk.