Abstract
As contemporary art tends to diverge from its fixed genres and intends to appeal to the public, fashion comes to contribute to the contemporary art area, by playing an important part in the creation of artistic value of art work. Nowadays, it is not unusual to see fashion work shown in an art exhibition parallel with art work, since some artists adopt costumes as the medium of their work in order to explore various means of expression. The occurrence of philosophical, sociological theories concerning human body parallelled with the prevalence of the post-structuralist ideas and occurrence of various styles of artistic expressions of body encouraged active research and attracted social attention to body. With such background, fashion art was formed by a means of the integration of body and fashion in order to create extreme artistic expression. 1 intend to investigate a variety of trends in fashion art from the viewpoint of body space. This study developed criteria for fashion image in contemporary art. Those criteria are based on the dichotomy that divides body into inner aspects and outer aspects. According to the criteria, Firstly, the extension type of body shape includes enlargement and reduction as its sub-types. Secondly, the opening-closure type includes opening type and closure type as its sub-types. Thirdly, the intensity type categorizes clothes into uniqueness and hybridity. Dynamism type classifies fashion art into fixation and moving. The various expressions of clothes type are interpreted as a means by which we can criticize many phenomena of modern society, such as loss of humanity, isolation of individuals, loss of identity, commercialism, and materialism. In the latter period of modern society, the integration of the double-faced nature of body and spirit was attempted and popular fashion was introduced into art in order to express desire, death, gender, identity, and sexual pleasure.