Alexander McQueen, Purple Flowers -- combining inspiration from nature, design, architecture, and fashion.

Famed French couturier Paul Poiret once said, “I have always liked painters. It seems to me that we are in the same trade and that they are my colleagues.” Yet fashion has had to struggle to gain that “collegiality” among the arts, being also seen as “the bastard child of capitalism and female vanity,” according to Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Elyssa Jechow contemplates the question of the claim of fashion as an art form, and its challenges, in our newest article from The Muse Dialogue: “Is Fashion Art?“