Two art forms that are more connected than you might think.

Talk to anyone who has tattoos about why they chose to get art permanently inked into their skin, and they’ll likely say that it has to do with expressing themselves. While there are a variety of reasons people choose to get a tattoo, those reasons often boil down to self-expression in one form or another. People like to make their outward appearance reflect something about who they are, what they think about the world, and what is important to them, and getting a tattoo (or tattoos) is an excellent way to do that.

Similarly, if you were to ask a fashion designer or street-fashion guru about why they are passionate about fashion, you might hear the very same thing. Fashion is a less-permanent way that many people express themselves. You can, after all, often tell a lot about a person by the way they dress. Someone in a business suit and button-down sends a very different message than someone with ripped jeans and a leather jacket, for example.

Art is Art

Tattoos and fashion are both things that have come to be synonymous with self-expression, but there’s more to it than that. Tattoos and fashion are intrinsically linked—the two art forms have influenced each other throughout history, and still do today.

Perhaps this link is due to the fact that fashion and tattoos are both seen as unique, albeit not always traditional, forms of art. While tattoos have a more direct artistic link since they are literal art that is drawn onto a person’s skin, fashion, particularly avant-garde fashion, is often considered art and is even on display at art museums like the Denver Art Museum.

Tattoos Inspired Fashion

It’s really no wonder that tattoos and fashion are so greatly linked to one another. Both are displayed on the body, after all. Fashion can often be contrasted or accented by the wearer’s tattoos, and temporary tattoos have even been used on models at Paris Fashion Week to enhance a designer’s aesthetic for runway shows like with the recent  Victor and Rolf show in spring 2020.

Tattoo styles have even served as inspiration for the prints and designs on fashion itself. One of the first and most well-known instances of this was in 1971 when Issey Miyake created his collection of tattoo-inspired fashion ensembles, including dresses and bodysuits that were flesh-toned and featured tattoo-style illustrations of famous rock and roll artists like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The dresses and bodysuits almost made the wearer appear as if the clothing was tattooed onto their skin rather than simply a garment they were wearing.

Since that 1970s collection by Issey Miyake, tattoos have continued to serve as inspiration for fashion designers. In 1994, for example, Jean Paul Gaultier followed in Miyake’s footsteps with a collection of garments that featured tattooed designs on sheer mesh and flesh-toned fabric.

More recently, tattoo-inspired fashion has seen a resurgence on the runway. In 2015, Comme des Garçons Homme Plus fall and winter collection featured tattoo-style patterns on leggings, sleeves, and even entire menswear-inspired suits. Similarly, Junya Watanabe utilized tattooed models in his spring 2017 runway show, and even added black tattoos to un-tattooed models in order to showcase the punk style themes of his collection.

Aside from Victor and Rolf in 2020, one of the most recent fashion designers to clearly draw inspiration from tattoos for his 2019 spring collection was Demna Gvaslia. This particular collection featured a top that invoked the same tattoo type imagery as the sheer tattoo tops shown in the 90s in Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring collection.

Fashion Inspired Tattoos

Both the art forms of tattooing and fashion have served as inspiration for each other over the decades, as evidenced by the plethora of tattoo examples that can be found online that are fashion-related. You can find examples of tattoos that fashion designers might get inked into their skin like images of sewing machines or dress forms, as well as tattoos inspired by literal fashion, like a red high heel inked onto a wrist or a sleeve full of Louis Vuitton logos.

Fashion has served as a blank canvas for designers to express themselves through tattoo-like patterns and using literal tattoos to accentuate their garments. Clothing is also used as a way to explore the relationship between the body and the clothing that drapes it. Similarly, fashion designers and their brands have served as countless sources of inspiration for the tattoos fashion lovers and designers themselves have gotten as permanent sources of self-expression.

Tattoo Artists and Fashion Designers

While tattoos have certainly been inspired by fashion, and vice versa, there have also been some tattoo artists who have ventured into the fashion industry. The most famous of these artists is Ed Hardy, an extremely successful and well-revered tattoo artist based in San Francisco. Hardy was an important artist in the world of tattooing because he was tattooing at a time when the art form still wasn’t particularly mainstream. Ed Hardy is credited with bringing about much of the popularity of tattooing that we know today.

If you weren’t familiar with Ed Hardy as a tattoo artist, however, you may very well have heard of the clothing brand with his name attached to it. While Hardy himself wasn’t super involved with the extremely popular clothing line other than the fact that his name was attached and his artwork was the inspiration for much of the items sold, Ed Hardy clothing saw immense popularity in the early 2000s. While certainly not couture fashion, the Ed Hardy clothing brand brought tattoo-inspired clothing to the masses, and further cemented the two art forms as intrinsically intertwined.

When you think of fashion, you may not think of tattoos. Similarly, when you come across an amazing tattoo design or tattoo artist like the best tattoo artists in Denver at Certified Tattoo Studios, you might not immediately think of fashion. Nevertheless, fashion and tattoos have a long-standing history and still influence each other today. Both forms of self-expression, and true artforms in and of themselves, are important to so many people—tattooed and un-tattooed alike.