Have Fashion Folk Ruined the Frieze London Experience?

Frieze Week has become a pilgrimage site for fashion folk. Since 2022, the fashion population has been aggressively migrating to the art fair; that same year McQueen and Roksanda staged their runways shows to coincide with Frieze London and Frieze Masters. In the lead-up to Frieze Week, there has been some chatter among art journalists, publicists and gallerists about the increasing number of fashion attendees making a pitstop just for an Instagram photo.

So, has fashion ruined Frieze?

“Ruined might be a stretch, but I do think that the glut of selfie-hungry fashion girlies may have somewhat cheapened the experience, and I say that as a selfie-hungry fashion girlie myself,” Mahoro Seward, fashion and style editor at British Vogue, told ARTnews.

The Wednesday VIP day has become a day of who’s who: This year’s attendees included Tilda Swinton, Raf Simons, Dries Van Noten, Monica Barbaro, and Bianca Jagger wearing John Galliano’s Zara collection. And the outfits at the fair, or costumes for lack of a better word, got more conceptual (perhaps even more so than the artwork). There were leather, fur, sequins, and two people in matching PVC catsuits in action inside the hot tent.

During London Fashion Week such kooky outfits grant cheers from street style photographers, but at Frieze, they’re side-eyed. “In fashion, the more shameless you are, the more you get praised. Fashion people have made a gimmick of the fashion industry,” said one fashion editor, who asked to remain anonymous. That’s not to say that art folk don’t like dressing up and expressing themselves, but it’s usually in a pleated Issey Miyake piece or a neat Hermès overcoat or Evelyne bag.

Kristell Chadé, Frieze’s executive director of fairs, is of a “the more, the merrier” opinion. It’s economically beneficial for Frieze and the galleries when fashion wants to get involved, she says. In 2023, Stone Island joined Frieze London as a partner and offered bursaries to 34 emerging galleries, while Dunhill launched its inaugural partnership with Frieze Masters. “Frieze is a platform for various voices and different disciplines. I think having that richness and diversity is what makes the fair unique,” Chadé told ARTnews.

More brands have started to take note. Tiffany & Co. has been a partner for Frieze’s Artist-to-Artist initiative since last year and similarly; Loewe has sponsored Frieze London’s VIP program. (It also doesn’t hurt that Loewe’s campaigns make for beautiful imagery on the back of the fair map brochure.)

“Then again,” Seward, the British Vogue editor, said, “I don’t think Frieze is exactly hallowed ground. Yes, there’s brilliant work on show of critical merit, but it’s fundamentally a commercial forum.”

Fashion’s invasion of the art world is a strategic ploy—brands are trying to lure the same consumers that are splashing out more than $6 million on Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (1607–8), which sold for that amount at Hauser & Wirth’s Frieze Masters booth. The luxury fashion industry is grappling its own slowdown: Consumers are spending cautiously, and brands are increasingly raising their prices. It’s the reason fashion has inhabited spaces such as F1, the US Open and Frieze London.

When Roksanda Ilinčić staged her spring 2023 show the night before Frieze London commenced, she did so because her audience is “much more art and creatives-related, which is incredible because it’s a big portion of my customers and usually they’re not able to come to the show, but now they’re all in town (for Frieze), so it’s lovely to be able to see them,” she told me at the time.

“Fashion loves to get its hands on everything. We’ve seen it in sports, art, theater and Hollywood. Fashion is its own force,” Sunita Kumar Nair, author of Ace: The Times & Style of Tennis, told ARTnews. In her book, she observes how fashion has become a Trojan horse in tennis and can see the same pattern taking form in the art world. “Fashion is like a form of nature: It can either destroy or create if it’s in excess. For me, writing about tennis and fashion was just a really inevitable angle that I saw because of its popularity.”

Shifting the blame onto fashion folk for ruining the Frieze experience may be unfair, but a quick scan of Instagram, they are always the first to plant their flag. “Posting from Frieze is the new ‘I was here’ scratched on a wall,” said one veteran fashion publicist. After all, swanning around in Balenciaga and air kissing with a tulip of Ruinart in hand has never been a crime. Not yet, anyway.