No challenge, it seems, is too great for Ottawa’s indefatigable fashion designer Richard Robinson.

We all remember Robinson’s outrageous outfits for Marlen Cowpland. Probably fewer people remember that in 2007 the Hamilton Art Gallery elevated Cowpland’s skintight catsuit with diamond nipple to high art, placing it centre stage in an “art” exhibition of Robinson designs.

That was not the first, nor the last, time the lines between fashion, art and scandal were blurred so marvellously. Visit Montreal this summer, where the cone-shaped bras designed for Madonna by Jean-Paul Gaultier are the biggest hits at an art exhibition at Musee des beaux-arts. (more…)