I used to think fashion and graphic design were separate universes—one draped in silk, the other pixelated on screens.
Turns out, they’ve been tangled together since at least the 1920s, when Art Deco wasn’t just decorating skyscrapers but also stitching geometric patterns into flapper dresses. The Bauhaus movement, which most people associate with minimalist chairs and primary-color posters, actually had a textile workshop where artists like Anni Albers wove designs that looked like they could’ve been ripped from a Mondrian painting. Fashion designers borrowed the movement’s obsession with functionality and clean lines—Coco Chanel’s little black dress wasn’t just revolutionary fashion, it was basically a manifesto in fabric form, stripping away the ornamental excess that graphic designers were also rejecting in their posters and typography. The cross-pollination was messy and unplanned, but it worked. Both fields were reacting to the same cultural exhaustion with Victorian fussiness, and honestly, you can see it in how both mediums started embracing negative space and asymmetry around the same time.
By the 1960s, the relationship got louder and more psychedelic. Pop Art exploded, and suddenly Andy Warhol’s soup cans were showing up on Yves Saint Laurent’s dresses—literally, the Mondrian dress collection happened in 1965, taking those bold graphic blocks and making them wearable. designers like Mary Quant were creating looks that felt like walking advertisements, with sharp angles and color-blocking that wouldn’t look out of place on a concert poster.
Wait—maybe the most obvious example is how punk aesthetics in the late 1970s merged DIY graphic design with fashion in ways that still influence both industries today, give or take a few decades of evolution.
Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s designs for the Sex Pistols weren’t just clothes; they were collages, safety pins holding together ripped fabrics alongside hand-scrawled slogans and xeroxed images that mimicked the cut-and-paste zine culture. The typography was aggressive, deliberately ugly, rejecting the polished corporate design that dominated the era. Fashion became a medium for graphic expression, and graphic design became something you could wear as armor. Jamie Reid’s artwork for the Sex Pistols’ album covers used the same visual language—ransom-note lettering, torn paper, confrontational imagery—that Westwood was incorporating into her bondage trousers and provocative T-shirts. It was a feedback loop where each discipline pushed the other toward more radical experimentation, and the messiness was the point.
Here’s the thing: the digital revolution in the 1990s should’ve separated them again, but it didn’t.
Desktop publishing software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator gave graphic designers unprecedented control over images and typography, and fashion designers immediately seized those tools to create prints that would’ve been impossible to produce even a decade earlier. Alexander McQueen’s 2009 Plato’s Atlantis collection featured digitally-rendered prints of marine life and reptilian scales, patterns so complex they required software to generate and refine them. The runway shows themselves became exercises in multimedia design, with projected graphics, experimental lighting, and video installations that blurred the line between fashion presentation and immersive graphic environments. Streetwear brands like Supreme understood this instinctively—their box logo wasn’t just branding, it was a graphic design icon that people wore as a statement, turning bodies into walking billboards in a way that felt somehow both corporate and countercultural.
Anyway, I guess it makes sense that in 2025, the distinction feels almost meaningless—fashion is graphic design you inhabit, and graphic design is just fashion for ideas.
