The implications were multi-faceted. But the work certainly underscored the rise of an “anything goes” art climate, in which specific movements were dead and the very definition of art was hard to pin down. Anything could be defined as art and so Rhoades threw anything he felt like into his last artwork. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Rhoades seemed to claim what he did was art simply by virtue of his being an artist.

This is exactly where fashion finds itself today. We have entered a state of pure postmodernism, where anything goes and nothing means anything anymore.

Is fashion dead and did H&M kill it?

Fashion once had its old masters in Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, its impressionists in Yves Saint Laurent and Cristobal Balenciaga, and a long stretch of its own modernist avant-garde starting with Vivienne Westwood and continuing through Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler to Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and the Antwerp Six.

It has its own pop art in Versace and Moschino, minimalists in Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, deconstructionists in Martin Margiela and Rick Owens, and provocateurs in Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.

But what united all of the above is that they were fashion designers, meaning they had aesthetic direction and worked to convey a theme or tell a story.

Now we find ourselves in a totally different situation. Fashion in the original sense still exists. But plenty of new forms of fashion have sprung up alongside this. H&Mand Zara are fashion. Nike and Adidas are fashion. Supreme and Stüssy are fashion. Any piece of clothing is fashion, and so is the way we dress.

But this phenomenon used to have another name. When I interviewed the art historian Valerie Steele several years ago, I asked her what the word “fashion” meant. She suggested that it was basically how one puts clothes together. To which I thought, wait a minute, that’s what we used to call style.

Now we find ourselves in a totally different situation. Fashion in the original sense still exists. But plenty of new forms of fashion have sprung up alongside this. H&Mand Zara are fashion. Nike and Adidas are fashion. Supreme and Stüssy are fashion. Any piece of clothing is fashion, and so is the way we dress.

But this phenomenon used to have another name. When I interviewed the art historian Valerie Steele several years ago, I asked her what the word “fashion” meant. She suggested that it was basically how one puts clothes together. To which I thought, wait a minute, that’s what we used to call style.