Damien Hirst recently decorated a backpack for The Row. Raf Simons, in a collection for Jil Sander, embellished sweaters with Picasso’s work. Art on the runway is never hard to find.
But here’s one new site that takes the marriage of art and fashion one step further—by putting fashion into paintings. It’s called Ubicouture, and is the brainchild of Christos Mouchas, an unemployed 19-year-old from Greece. He got the idea for the blog when he saw photos online from Simons’s final show for Jil Sander, whose set was a sea of beautiful boxed bouquets. “A few days earlier, I had seen a painting by Gustav Klimt,” Mouchas tells The Daily Beast by email. “So having in mind these two images, they somehow ‘crashed.’ I imagined the models from the show walking on that Klimt path and I said: ‘Why not make it real?’”
Since the blog began in March 2012, Mouchas has introduced Prada to Frank Stella, Givenchy to El Greco, and Céline to Clifford Still. Sitting in front of his broken laptop in Athens, he has allowed fashion to take him to wild, faraway places: Monet’s Normandy, Van Gogh’s wheat fields; Hockney’s Los Angeles. Mouchas says he owns no art history books. Instead, he finds a runway look he loves, and then pairs it with a piece of art he finds online (using Tumblr, Google, or WikiPaintings)—and Photoshops the two together.
“I just finished a set for which I combined a look from Prada Autumn/Winter 2013–14 with the A Bigger Splash painting by David Hockney,” he says. “The inspiration was Prada’s venue and the collection’s palette. I thought they matched perfectly with Hockney’s work.”
And though he’s now amassed a small following on Tumblr, Mouchas says only one of his friends knows about Ubicouture. “I kind of feel that if I start talking about it,” he says, “it’s like showing off. And I loathe that.”