February 1982. (Artforum).

Twenty years ago this month, editor Ingrid Sischy's eyebrow-raising cover image of a model in an Issey Miyake "rattan bodice and nylon polyester skirt" introduced the February 1982 Special Issue. Walker Arts Center curator and onetime Art forum managing editor Richard Flood looks back at Sischy's pleats pleas.

THE FEBRUARY 1982 Artforum was designated a "Special Issue," and indeed it is. First, there is the cover, a photograph of a model wearing an Issey Miyake ensemble. Inside, Lawrence Weschler delivers a brilliant essay on the design graphics of Poland's Solidarity movement, and future Random House publisher Harold Evans offers savvy readings on opinion-changing news photographs. German critic Bazon Brock muses on advertising, desire, and "heavenly architecture," and J. Hoberman searches for "authentic vulgar post-modernism" in the pages of Mad and the films of Frank Tashlin. The most ambitious essay (in format and content) is Glenn O'Brien's "Bop Art," an extended riff on the state of music. Then there's a gatefold with Warhol's dollar signs accompanied by one of Christopher Makos's airbrushed portraits of Warhol in a Carole Lombard wig, oxford shirt, and jeans, which not surprisingly beats out a spread featuring Miyake's "Transformation Coat." The final nonreview contributions are a perplexing (as in "Gee, thi s is bad!") photo spread by Marie Cosindas and a spiffy 331/3 floppy vinyl record by Laurie Anderson. All in all, it's what I'd call a collector's issue. And, all in all, it does everything within its editor's power to avoid a direct confrontation with contemporary art.

For all these wonderful provocations, it is the short italicized paragraph at the head of the Reviews section that whispers the real revolution that had begun months earlier under editor Ingrid Sischy's auteurist reign. Its essential sentence reads: "Illustrations within the review section are designed to be considered as references to (not reproductions of) original works." In its diligent, economical attempt to iterate a crucial understanding regarding the use and abuse of pictures as bookmarks for reality, it's a marvelous concept. It is also a conspiratorial extension of a zeitgeist initiated by such 'Pictures" theorists as Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine when they began mining the seductive depths of the collective image bank. Sischy's caveat vis-a-vis her broader program at the magazine may, in the end, be the most important statement in the issue, but the hue and cry surrounding the Miyake cover was the news.

Fashion's road to the cover of Art forum is delineated in a two-page editorial coauthored by contributing editor Germano Celant. The argument for a haute couture cover mostly makes sense (as do many ungainly equivalencies when gracefully argued), but, in the ascribed context, so would any seasonally reborn luxury product. Nonetheless, Sischy and Celant's essay is definitely more than a justification for a capricious cover image:

The tradition of Artforum is not to limit its territory to one visual world, and the borders of its coverage have fluctuated in order to maintain a fluidity toward, and a discussion of, the very definition of art, which needs to break down to affirm its strength. One could say, in fact, that the history of this magazine lies in examining the resulting fragments. In part, this issue seeks to confront artmaking that retains its autonomy as it enters mass culture at the blurred boundary of art and commerce, and... popular art.

It was particularly appropriate that Sischy chose to partner with Celant, who, more than a decade earlier, had persuasively argued all of the editorial's points in a now historical series of essays pertaining to arte povera. More than any of his contemporaries (other than his compatriot Carla Lonzi), Celant had attempted to collapse artistic discipline into a new entity that championed the engagement of art and life. In the '90s, Sischy and Celant cocurated a fashion extravaganza in Florence. Sischy became a fashion trendsetter as editor of Interview. Celant became artistic director of the Fondazione Prada.

As if echoing February '82, the September 2001 pages of Artforum were filled with fashion spreads of gorgeous adverts for Prada and two franchises (Jil Sander and Helmut Lang), as well as Dior, Fendi, Yves Saint Laurent, and Kate Spade, because, unlike '82, the fashion houses clearly feel that the art world is where they belong. Fashion no longer begs justification to graze idly in the pages of an art magazine; in fact, the "blurred boundary of art and commerce" was already fading to black when the editorial was being written twenty years ago. Now I'm thinking about that Reviews section blurb and realize that, with a simple substitution, I can create a mantra to erase any anxiety I'm feeling as regards the classification of what is fashionable and what is artistic: Fashion is designed to be considered as a reference to (not a reproduction of) original work.