When high fashion meets high art in a collection of hats designed by one of the world’s most sought-after painters, it is little surprise prices are not capped.
A Dior bowler hat hand-painted, signed and dated by the Edinburgh-born artist Peter Doig is the crowning glory of a small but exclusive range, priced at $150,000 (£109,000), while woollen berets peak at $70,000.
Eight of these creations are available to buy, but will not be sold conventionally through Dior stores. Instead clients will book one-to-one appointments, just as they might if they were interested in buying a great work of art.
Doig’s paintings are highly sought-after. Rosedale, one of his breakthrough works from the early 1990s, fetched £22 million when it came to auction in 2017. Only works by David Hockney command higher prices among living British painters.
Doig, 61, was commissioned last autumn by Kim Jones, creative director of Dior Men, to collaborate on the Dior 2021 autumn/winter collection, developing designs inspired by his own work.
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A digital catwalk show in January caused a sensation in the fashion press: Doig’s “oeuvre was turned into bold, graphic prints, in others his painterly style spilled freely across garments”, gushed one critic. Some outfits reproduced those featured in his paintings, such as a dappled shirt and wrestler’s helmet worn by a figure in his Two Trees, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The hats, though, stole the show, Doig adorning the fronts of bowler hats with his paintings of lions, while the berets were “elevated with mini landscapes and etchings of feathers,” according to a reviewer. Bowler hats and berets were created with the milliner Stephen Jones, who met Doig when both were students at St Martin’s art college in London in the 1980s.
Doig told the Financial Times he had no qualms about working with a fashion house. “I took it as a challenge,” he said. “I had to, in a way, put the blinkers on and not think about recent collaborations. Not because I’m slighting them, but just because I wanted to try and think of it as a unique thing.” He was intensely involved in the work, adding: “You didn’t want it to be token. [I wanted it to have] integrity . . . but also if possible to have the whole collection be tainted by my work, my world.”
Doig agreed to the collaboration after meeting Jones, and was swayed by the fact that Christian Dior, who founded the fashion house, ran a Paris gallery before the Second World War.
He joins an illustrious list of artists who have worked with or inspired the world of high fashion. Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist, collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli, one of the most outrageous designers of the 1920s and 1930s, creating the lobster dress and shoe hat.
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Gianni Versace’s spring 1991 collection featured outfits printed with Andy Warhol’s bright, silk-screen portraits of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and other style icons.
Doig was two when he left Scotland. He spent his childhood in Trinidad, grew up in Canada, trained in London, and travelled before returning to Trinidad.
