Robert Rauschenberg at New York Fashion Week Rauschenberg’s collages infused Jason Wu's show with a spirit of artistry beyond the runway

By William Van Meter

This year marks the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth, with exhibitions planned around the world. Jason Wu’s runway show could have served as one of them, his Brooklyn Navy Yard stage transformed into a veritable Rauschenberg showcase. Partnering with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Wu staged his “Collage” collection inside A Quake in Paradise (Labyrinth) (1994), a monumental installation loaned by the Foundation. Transparent, opaque, and reflective panels layered with Rauschenberg’s own photographs refracted the models into living collages.

The clothes themselves carried this spirit of recomposition. Granted rare access to the Foundation’s holdings, Wu concentrated on Rauschenberg’s “Hoarfrosts” (1974–76) and Airport Suite (1974), series that marked a decisive turn in the artist’s engagement with textiles during the 1970s. The Hoarfrosts are unstretched panels of silk, muslin, and cheesecloth imprinted with solvent-transferred images from magazines and newspapers—works that hang freely and shift with the air, their ghostly impressions recalling Rauschenberg’s longstanding interest in the instability of the image. Created in the same period, Airport Suite extended these transfer processes into layered fabric prints that combined newsprint fragments, photographic transfers, and collage.

Wu not only drew on these sources but incorporated actual imagery from Rauschenberg’s work, translating the artist’s sensibility into silhouettes that could be as architectonic and structurally assertive as his “Combines,” yet also delicate in their juxtaposition of pattern with transparency, solidity with tatters. Together these references underscore how Rauschenberg was collapsing distinctions between printmaking, textile, and installation in the 1970s—an experimental energy that Wu adapted into a contemporary fashion language.

“It has been a dream come true working with the Rauschenberg Foundation and having access to his incredible body of work,” Wu said. “This collection, themed ‘Collage,’ is my tribute to Mr. Rauschenberg’s work and my personal journey as an immigrant who collects what seem disparate references into my creations.”