Good question. This brings to mind the question of whether or not a recreation of, say, a Worth gown is art. Certainly it was art the first time, but is what we're doing also art?
I'm not sure it was even art the first time. Worth actually had a fairly large concern and churned out numbers of very similar garments. I don't see that couture is necessarily art.
And are we in the wrong century to be calling our work art if we're creating a gown of a new design in a decades-old, or centuries-old, style? Interesting point you brought up.
If it's an attempt at an exact reproduction, I think not. It may be beautiful, it may be well made, but that doesn't make it art. It's really an effort not to be original.
When I was studying weaving and other texile arts (in parallel with studying clothing design in another department of the same university, and history in yet another department), the other students sneered at anything they called "yardage." Making garments was not hip. I was at variance with the general opinion because I've always wanted everything I made to be useful. For example, my crochet class was taught by a visiting instructor, a fiber artist well known at the time. We were all encouraged to attend an exhibit of her work. I went, and was puzzled by her current phase, which consisted of enormous, much larger than life kimonos with crocheted pictures. They were beautiful, but there was quite enough room on an ordinary-sized kimono for the same pictures at smaller scale. But, she said, if they were wearable they wouldn't really be art. Huh?
There was one student who presented, for a weaving class critique, a beautiful curtain, or as she called it a window hanging, in leno weave (which some people call "lace weave" even though it is not technically lace). She said she planned to hang it in her living room window. She received a lot of praise, which emboldened her to say that she actually had three windows in her living room and already had her loom strung to make two more hangings. Immediately the praise turned to condemnation. "Oh, that would be _yardage_." I thought that was silly; if one piece is art is it really degraded by her making a mere two others? On the other hand, I have to say that if she'd churned them out by the hundreds I might stop calling it art.
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