The former Creative Director of Jill Sander and Dior, who was just announced as Calvin Klein’s Chief Creative Officer today (Aug 2), has always been verbal about how contemporary art influences him as a designer. He’s a big fan of American artist Sterling Ruby (he collaborated with Ruby for his eponymous menswear line as well as in Dior’s F/W ’14 collection, as seen in the documentary Dior & I). Besides Ruby’s works, his private collection includes that of American artists such as Evan Holloway, Mike Kelley and Brian Calvin.

While the Kaiser sold his contemporary art collection in 1972, he still collects furniture, objets d’arts and photography (he’s known to be a huge fan of photographer Helmut Newton). After first picking up a camera in 1987, he’s now considered a photographer in his own right. Currently on view, Karl Lagerfeld: A Visual Journey at the Pinacotheque de Paris in France runs through March 20, featuring the designer’s photographs of models, self portraits and unseen screen prints.

Photo: Pinacothèque de Paris

Miuccia and her husband Patrizio Bertelli have been seriously collecting post-war and contemporary art since the early ’90s. Her passion for art, however, remains separate from her designs. Perhaps, the closest the fields have come is when she commissioned Belgian artist Carsten Holler to build a slide for her to leave the office every day (many of his artworks commonly feature this apparatus weaving through floors and outside buildings).

Over the last two decades, the Fondazione Prada cultural institution has been organising exhibitions and research initiatives and just last year, the much awaited Rem Koolhaas-designed building opened in Milan, housing significant parts of the couple’s extensive collection.

Image: @Silviagrilli Instagram

While Issey Miyake has retired from catwalks and seasonal collections, it doesn’t mean that his creative juices have stopped flowing. In 2007, together with award-winning architect Tadao Ando, he opened the small museum 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo (currently on view is a show about the architect Frank Gehry, which runs through February 7, 2016).

For his Pleats Please line, Miyake has collaborated with artists like Yasumasa Morimura, Tim Hawkinson, Nobuyoshi Araki and Cai Guo-Qiang long before most designers (like Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton) did so. Find out more about his creative process in a major retrospective of his work at Tokyo’s National Art Centre (Mar 16-June 13).

According to W Magazine, the American designer’s passion for collecting art began in 2002 when he purchased Karen Kilimnik’s “Mary Calling Up a Storm” (1996) for a princely sum of USD $31,000 (S$44,660). His collection now includes works by the likes of American visual artist Richard Prince, famed English painters Damien Hirst and David Hockney and American portraiture whiz Elizabeth Peyton.

He even joined Instagram last year (a little late to the game!) with a photo of his USD$2 million work by Ed Ruscha titled “She Gets Angry at Him”. As the former Creative Director for Louis Vuitton, Jacobs is also well known for collaborating with the likes of Takashi Murakami (remember LV’s animated motif bags in 2004?) and Yayoi Kusama in 2012.

Image: @themarcjacobs Instagram

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