Andy Warhol
The Souper Dress, c1968
Titled on a care label affixed to the neck
Screenprint in colours on cellulose and cotton
Dress: 96.5 x 59.5cm
Framed: 114 x 78cm

It's tempting, when taking a trip through the history of art, to think of each artistic movement as a sort of club, with membership rules and a mission statement. With a few exceptions, the reality is usually a lot messier. This is especially true of Pop Art, which was never a movement as such but, as art historian Marco Livingstone neatly put it, "a sensibility emergent in the 1950s and rampant in the 1960s."

From its earliest days, Pop Art had broken down the boundaries between art and commerce, image and design, the rarefied and the everyday. Warhol himself had begun his career as an acclaimed fashion illustrator. It was natural then that fashion should so emphatically embrace the spirit of Pop.

Warhol's iconic 1962 exhibition of soup can paintings had brought him widespread fame. Selected New York socialites had begun to wear custom-made dresses bearing Warhol's design to gallery openings. Private commissions from the artist himself, they were never sold commercially and were incredibly exclusive.

These developments did not go unnoticed by the Campbell's Soup Company, who were keen to make the most of their newfound cult status. Combining the fad for paper dresses with Warhol's imagery, they launched a promotion in which anybody who sent them two soup labels and a dollar would be mailed a "Souper Dress" in return. The dresses could not be washed and were only intended to be worn once or twice. The hem could be cut to the preferred length by using the stripes at the bottom as a guide. The first of these dresses were made in 1966, when paper clothing was being heralded as the future of fashion. As it turned out, most wearers found that such items tore and creased far too easily to be practical, and the trend had largely run its course by the end of the decade.

Examples of the Campbell's "Souper Dress" are held in major museum collections across the globe. You can find them in MoMA (New York), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of New Zealand (Wellington), and the V & A (London).

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