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Surreal dressing for surreal times: why autumn’s most interesting fashion is directly inspired by art

Fashion and art have long been happy bedfellows, but the autumn/winter 2022 shows take the link to the next level

Artist Eva Rothschild’s angled wood sculptures — part of an exhibition at the Tate Britain gallery venue — provided the backdrop to Roksanda Ilincic’s autumn/winter show

Poetry is a word often used to describe clothing when design reaches beyond the limits of functionality and commercialism and into the conceptual, and while the new season was a bit of literary love-in, with references to mid-century Danish verse, Ukrainian resistance prose and a posthumously published piece by Sylvia Plath, designers demonstrated a proclivity for the art world, too.

In Paris, there was a surrealist vibe present, and given the movement originally flourished in ...