Julio Le Parc Brought The Rainbow Into Fashion And Pop Culture

Fashion and art have always intertwined—just look at Jeff Koons’ collaboration with Louis Vuitton, where he put Claude Motel paintings on luxury handbags, or Damien Hirst’s purse line for Prada. It all dates to 1960, when French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent put Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings onto a series of mod dresses.

One overlooked purveyor of the rainbow is Argentinean artist Julio Le Parc, who is based in Cachan, a small region outside of Paris. He is a bona fide purveyor of the rainbow in pop culture.

The multi-color rainbow is something Le Parc has been painting since the 1970s, even though he sees it as an exploration of light. Le Parc has inspired rainbow textiles, geometric abstract and wave-like patterns in fashion over the past half-century.

Granted, we’re used to seeing the sequential rainbow on the LGBT flag, on the streets of sunny Key West, or even in street art, like murals in Brooklyn, but now, we can trace the rainbow back to Le Parc’s artworks, which are currently on view at Galeria RGR in Mexico City. This is where we truly see the rainbow in all its magnificent glory, in the exhibition titled Julio Le Parc: Visual Encounters, which runs until November 12.

Le Parc has a strict guideline for his paintings, he only uses 14 colors and numbered them accordingly. The lightest tone (yellow) through orange (number 14) is what the artist calls “a chromatic circle.”

“This range has allowed me to make an enormous number of permutations,” said Le Parc, who is 94.

All of his paintings have the same colors, but he switches them up. “I simply change the position of the colors, and the range appears differently,” he said. “So, the range is no longer sequential.”

We see that in his works, like in five of his series which are on view at Galerie RGR, from his “Alchimie” series to his “Surface-Coleur” series, artworks from 1959 to 2022. “Painting is my life every day,” he says. And it has been—the artist has been painting the rainbow for over 50 years.

It calls to mind how the rainbow has made its way into high fashion. Designers like Alice + Olivia brought multicolor stripes to their Janan Rainbow Midi dress, while Valentino’s Crepe de Chine pajama shirt has a vintage Bayadère print from 1973, bringing together red and green monochromes.

Or even how Christian Louboutin’s Marthastrass sandals are studded with rainbow-colored crystals, while Balenciaga has a multi-hued leather bag called the Rainbow Ville Camera Bag, covered in a sequential rainbow.

Fashion always follows art, and Le Parc was ahead of them all. The artist has had retrospectives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2018, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, in 2016, at Serpentine Galleries in London, in 2014, and at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in 2013. He also won the Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, and since, sparked inspiration in the public eye.

New looks showcased at Paris Fashion Week echo Le Parc’s work, like in the street style, where Gucci bags, like their GG Supreme tote, with a rainbow sunrise, have been spotted, while abstract prints are having a major fashion moment, like in Yanina Couture’s rainbow dresses, too.

And at New York Fashion Week, handbag brand Telfar brought a rainbow-hued pop-up shop at Rainbow in Brooklyn, showcasing their latest line of rainbow handbags, which had fashionistas lining up around the block, and are still available online.

And who can forget that time when Virgil Abloh painted a rainbow runway for Louis Vuitton’s Paris Fashion Week show in 2018? The Palais-Royale gardens were turned into a “gradient painting,” as the designer called it. He called it “a kaleidoscopic palette evolving from off-white to polychromatic, synchronously forming a holographic archway known to represent dreams,” adding that the gradient rainbow was “A motif in The Wizard of Oz, which provides construct to the Spring-Summer 2019 collection.”

It all started with a greyscale. He started out painting monochromatic grey scales, then turned to color—first six colors, then 10, and eventually 14 colors, which he has stuck with since 1959. Since, he has become a kingpin of Op Art (optical art) and Kinetic Art movements. And as we know, Op Art has influenced Mod fashion in the 1960s when patterns, like ones we see in the artworks of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, appeared on A-line dresses, to furniture and curtains.

The rainbow is traditionally a symbol of joy and optimism. And that simple statement ties into the artist, who once said that he hopes that a wide audience sees his artwork—beyond art world insiders.

“If people on a low income, who occupy a subordinate position in terms of social life, work and family, can recover a bit of energy and optimism by visiting an exhibition,” he said in 2020, “they might be able to proceed in a different way in a different aspect of their lives with that acquired energy.”