Street-art and graffiti on the catwalk Where fashion and street art meet: from Vivienne Westwood and Keith Haring in the 80s to the SS21 runways

Art and fashion have been together for a while now, just think of the Yves Saint Laurent dresses from the Mondrian collection, the Elsa Schiaparelli collections in collaboration with Salvador Dalì or the more recent ones between Alexander McQueen and Damien Hirst. However, the catwalks are not the common ground of these two worlds, but the street is.

The road is where trends come from, before the advent of the internet and the bombardment of images to which we are subjected every day, it was the cool hunters who went around the world to catch what would be fashionable. And it is outside museums, beyond canvases and frames that art has sought and still seeks its place. Born as a protest between the 1950s and 1960s and exploded with the arrival of spray cans in the 1980s, it is actually in these years that Street-art and fashion meet.

The Witches collection by Westwood and Haring

Or rather, to bring these worlds together are two personalities that are anything but ordinary. It is during a trip to New York that a young Vivienne Westwood meets the artist Keith Haring and there it was creative love at first sight. From this unexpected union, between the pioneer of punk, owner of a clothing store, named Sex, at 430 Kings Road and the boy who smeared the subways of Manhattan - ended up in museums in 1978 and known today for his colorful men - that Witches was born. It was the winter of 1983/84, one of Westwood's most colorful collections, dazzled by the American metropolis and the colors of the fitness decade interpreted with Haring's "squiggles" reproduced on the shirt. An explosive potion, usually worn by the ultimate pop icon, Madonna!