Performance artist Marina Abramović has been on the cover of more style publications than a lot of top models could hope for, including those of influential fashion tastemakers V, Pop, and Elle. Facing the camera, she looks slick and glossy, with long dark shiny hair, very often with red lips and a matching manicure. Born in Serbia in 1956, she now lives a glittering life with easy access to the creative elite and wears outfits to match her status—often haute couture coordinated with a thousand-dollar-plus bag. Her favorite perfume is Wonderwood by Comme des Garçons.
She has a strong relationship with the music world as well. She has lent her work to Jay-Z, who recreated one of her performances at New York’s Pace Gallery when he dropped his single “Picasso Baby,” and Lady Gaga supported the Kickstarter campaign for Abramović’s traveling educational arts institute, MAI (Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art).
Dusan Reljin: © Dusan Reljin
Marina Abramović with model and author Crystal Renn, photographed for the August 2014 issue of Vogue Ukraine by Dusan Reljin.
Abramović’s attitude toward fashion today represents a complete U-turn from how she felt when she was younger—it’s almost as if this trendy phase is another installment in her career as a performance artist. In a 2005 Vogue interview, wearing an Alberta Ferretti sweater, she explained, “Until I walked the Great Wall in 1988 I wanted the public to see me in only one way. Very radical, no make-up, tough, spiritual. And after . . . there was a moment when I decided to stage my life, and have fun with it. I just said, why not? Let’s have it all.” She’s never looked back, not just wearing designer clothes but fully immersing herself in the industry. She’s worked with labels such as Costume National on high-profile events such as the Art of Elysium’s charity ball “Heaven” and made films, including one with sportswear king Adidas in 2014. She also created her own limited-edition clothing as part of the National Arts Club Art Capsule project. According to Women’s Wear Daily (2013), Abramović designed seven jumpsuits for the project—each in a different vitality-inducing color and containing “seven small magnets held in pockets strategically placed to denote certain energy points on the body.”
Abramović is fascinated by Maria Callas, whom she resembles. She owns pictures of the opera singer in which the two look quite similar.
The Lovers, Abramović’s performance at the Great Wall in 1988, is just one example of the endurance for which is celebrated. Starting from the eastern end of the wall, she walked fifteen hundred miles to meet her partner, the German performance artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen (Ulay), who was walking from the opposite end. They broke up after meeting on the wall, after twelve years together. Completing this project seems to have broken through any constraints she had felt about expressing herself through fashion. Her confidence in her work meant that she “didn’t need to prove anything to anybody anymore.” Rationalizing her new assessment of style, she thought, “I am an okay artist. I can do this. It felt liberating to embrace fashion. And I wasn’t ashamed of it.”
Abramović articulated her initial struggle with fashion in her films for the PBS series Art:21—Art in the 21st Century: “In the 1970s, when artists wore red lipstick and nail polish and anything in relation to fashion there was disgust, like you were being a really bad artist. It was like that was the way you were proving yourself, you couldn’t do it with the work. It was a big no-no.” Over time her attitude transformed, perhaps subconsciously. In a 2010 interview with AnOther, she said, “I had a secret desire to engage with fashion which I never admitted to myself, so the first time that I ever had serious money, I bought a Yamamoto suit. I felt so good in it, and without guilt!”
Today, she admits wearing lovely clothes that cause her no worries—except that “the one problem in my life is that everything is black, and when you open my closet you can’t find anything,” as she said, to Australian Harper’s Bazaar in 2017. Her friendship with Riccardo Tisci, the Italian designer who was creative director at Givenchy for twelve years, has been a fruitful and compelling one. She art-directed his 2015 show set on Pier 26, against the backdrop of the Hudson River. Tisci has nothing but praise for the artist, saying in an interview with Dazed Digital in 2013, “Marina is, for me, the world. She is black and white; romantic and tough; beautiful and ugly. She is elegant. She has the beauty of Mariacarla [Boscono], the intelligence of Einstein and the softness of my mother. . . . As a person, Marina is funny and brilliant and warm.”
In a 2018 interview with the Art Newspaper, Abramović says she learned how to swim when her father pushed her overboard from a boat and started to row away.
Tisci celebrated and explained the creative process of their relationship when he guest-edited the summer 2011 issue of Visionaire, which featured a black-and-white Mario Testino image of Tisci suckling Abramović’s breast—one of the most literal of all testimonies to how creative worlds can intertwine. In the issue, according to Abramović, “I said to him, this is the situation: do you admit that fashion is inspired by art? Well, I am the art, you are the fashion, now suck my tits! He’s very shy, so it took him a while to come around. But he did. During the shoot, I wanted to be in a state of mind, as if I were delivering the emotions of the artist whose work is being used as inspiration—luminous yet strong. Art is giving. Art is nourishing. Art is oxygen to society.”
Getty Images: Willy Vanderperre/Conde Nast via Getty Images
Former Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci photographed with his muses. From left: Tisci, singer Ciara, actress-singer Bambou (Caroline Von Paulus), model Diego Fragoso Calheiros Lins, actress Liv Tyler, stylist Panos Yiapanis, models Jonathan Marquez and Mariacarla Boscono, and Marina Abramović in W, September 2010.