Austrian-born Egon Schiele was the art world’s Rimbaud. He inspired the cover of David Bowie’s 1977 album Heroes, on which the pop star’s gaunt features, hollow cheeks, and angular hand position vividly echo a classic portrait of Schiele from 1904 by photographer Anton Josef Trčka. Created at the beginning of the twentieth century, Schiele’s paintings still look modern, and they have informed the work of voguish fashion illustrators including David Downton, Bil Donovan, and Richard Hanes. The English artist Tracey Emin is infatuated with Schiele, whom she discovered at the age of fourteen. She was immediately drawn to the magnetic, romantic reality he presented: “I was so influenced by him it was ridiculous. I was doing my own little versions . . . and I learned a lot,” she said in a 2017 Guardian interview. Schiele is also a touchstone for fashion’s rock-and-roll youth. During his years at Yves Saint Laurent, Hedi Slimane promoted a skinny silhouette that could have walked off a Schiele canvas. The campaign for Slimane’s spring/summer 2013 menswear collection shot model Saskia de Brauw in a black, pipe-cleaner-thin trouser suit, crouched in a corner with a troubled expression, her thin, elongated fingers stylishly posed. Stretched fingers are a Schiele feature typical of the skeletal and bony models he drew. Karl Lagerfeld’s slender angularity also suggests paintings by Schiele, and the skinny, spare house styles at Acne and Lanvin have stylishly reworked slim suiting and denim on Schiele lines for a cultivated twenty-first-century customer.
Getty Images: Austrian Archives/Imagno/Getty Images
Anton Josef Trčka’s famous portrait of Egon Schiele, 1914.
Coming from a poor family, Schiele aspired to wear smart clothes. As a youth, he satisfied his craving by cutting out fancy shirt collars from cardboard, creating a distinctive appearance on a frugal budget. He would often buy stylish outfits instead of everyday rations; his love of fashionable clothes can be seen in the few photographs that exist of him. Invariably he wears a shirt, tie, and suit that contrast charmingly with a swept-back hairstyle that occasionally veered toward the punkish with spikes. Schiele painted himself as he wanted the world to see him. Self-Portrait with a Peacock Waistcoat (1910) shows him wearing a waistcoat that “was almost definitely not his, as he was very poor and living in poverty with his lover, Wally Neuzil,” explains Klaus Albrecht Schröder. Schröder, who directs the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which exhibited a commemorative selection of Schiele works in 2018, goes on to say, “The picture is no mirror image, but inventions. He slips into the role of an elegant man who brings salvation to the world through his art.” Self-Portrait in a Shirt is another early selfie that is seminal Schiele. The boy artist depicts himself as a Bambi-eyed, cupid-lipped teen throb, staring out from the picture from under long eyelashes.
In 1906, when Schiele was sixteen, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He was the youngest student ever to attend but left without graduating, instead forming his own collective called the Neuekunstgruppe (New Art Group).
Along with many self-portraits, Schiele painted working-class girls who were gaunt, androgynous, and unafraid of their sexuality—a useful trait, as they often earned their living from sex work. Vienna teemed with prostitutes around the fin de siècle. The fine features that Schiele found so attractive were at odds with the norm for a healthy and wealthy woman: well fed, curvaceous, and shapely. Although Schiele is famous for his erotic nude or nearly nude images, many of his portraits spotlight fascinating elements of a bohemian wardrobe that contrasted with the era’s mainstream styles, which still veered toward pastel and froufrou. A Miss Waerndorfer in 1913 wears a loose-fitting red-polka-dot blouse that looks liberatingly modern, with three-quarter sleeves, a slash boatneck, and jaunty buttons on the shoulder. In 1914, Schiele painted Friederike Maria Beer—a socialite ambitious to be celebrated by the best artists of her time—wearing an ankle-length, brightly multicolored Missioni-esque tube dress topped with a turban. Schiele skilfully captured this avant-garde and unconventional outfit. He also did some illustration work: in 1910, the Wiener Werkstätte commissioned him to draw fashion postcards, which portray feminine elegance with a divinely appreciative line and his signature svelteness. These images, however, eschew angst and simply mirror beauty.
The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences. I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers.
—Egon Schiele, letter to Anton Peschka, 1910
Getty Images: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Peacock Vest Standing, 1911.
Schiele has moved many designers to create. John Galliano said in a 2000 New York Times article that the artist “has been a constant inspiration since my days as a student. There is a beauty in both the psychological aspect and in the color and line of his work.” Schiele’s influence is unmissable in Galliano’s work at Dior: after his 2004 couture show, he said to Sarah Mower at Vogue, “I went on a research trip to Vienna, and then got to looking at Egon Schiele.” Sarah Burton’s 2013 collections at Alexander McQueen drew on the visual appeal of Schiele’s mentor, Gustav Klimt; though, as she told Suzy Menkes, she was a big fan of Schiele, too, and used his work to kindle the collection.
Daniel Vosovic, who appeared on Project Runway and is now a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, turned to Schiele for his spring 2013 collection, printing a montage from an early work by him onto muddy yellow frocks. Reviewing the 2007 autumn/winter menswear collection by Dries van Noten, Hamish Bowles called it “Egon Schiele meets bling.” In a May 2017 shoot by Tim Walker for i-D, the models wore clothing by Gucci, Margiela, and Gosha Rubchinskiy on their ultra slim frames. The images are styled in the Schiele mode and reflect the non-stop appeal of his aesthetic.
The London Underground refused to display advertisements for a 2015 exhibition of Schiele’s paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, finding them too provocative.
In a 2011 New York Times review of his Photographer of Influence exhibition at the Nassau County Museum of Art, Richard Avedon summed up Schiele’s twenty-first-century appeal, citing “a candour and complexity to Schiele’s work that belies the tradition of flattery and lies in portrait making.” The artist’s vision, so progressive at the beginning of the twentieth century, also resonated at the end, when outsider and ugly beauty became new and interesting. As exemplified by the groundbreaking photography of Juergen Teller and Corinne Day in the 1990s, this new paradigm for fashion followed in Schiele’s footsteps, opening our eyes to the possibility that different and odd could be desirable.