Stripes

Artists and fashion designers love stripes: lines, parallel lines, vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonal lines, straight lines, wavy lines, crossed lines, black lines, white lines, perspective lines. The roster of modern artists who have created works manipulating stripes runs the gamut from Jasper Johns and Gene Davis to Sol LeWitt and Sean Scully. Likewise, one can’t venture out of the house without seeing people dressed in stripes of every color and orientation. Inevitably, Dario Zucchi takes full advantage of the conflation of costumes and canvases that feature prominent stripes and lines. Most of the people are caught half-length in this category, as opposed to some approaches where the artist prefers shoulder- or bust- length parallels.

Zucchi recorded the outfit of a woman standing in front of Ian Davenport’s monumental striped canvas as she blends effortlessly into the design (fig. 373). The wavy verticals below add some suggestion of added animation. In a similar way, the diagonal stripes across the dress worn by the woman who stands before a painting by Gene Davis interact with the color and pattern of the canvas (fig. 072). Zucchi exploits the wider horizontals of the young man’s shirt to contrast with the characteristic broad horizontal and vertical stripes of Sean Scully (fig. 251). In another instance, wide black diagonal stripes from a backpack parallel Tim Rollins’s X-shaped design beyond (fig. 250).

While color is an important tool for Zucchi’s work, some significant images emphasize black and white stripes. Alberto Garutti’s strong painting of black-and-white horizontals is the perfect analogous foil for a young woman’s white-and-black striped blouse (fig. 376). In one of Zucchi’s iconic images, he contrasts the stripes of a middle-aged woman’s outfit against the black and white lines of a Sol LeWitt perspective composition (fig. 073). Perfect combinations such as these are what often evoke incredulity on the part of viewers who find it hard to believe that the artist simply happened upon this pairing. Another Sol LeWitt optical design provided Zucchi with an opportunity to juxtapose a costume and a canvas (fig. 430). Here the diagonal lines of the young man’s shirt reinforce only the contours of LeWitt’s larger shapes. 

Thin lines are equally amenable to the photographer’s quest for the salient analogies between fashion and art (figs. 368 and 436). The straight razor stripes of the T-shirts set off the diagonal lines of the canvas in the former, while the curvy lines of the latter painting suggest the girth of the onlooker.