Raising questions about identity, style, culture, commerce and beauty, this volume reveals the ambivalent relationship between art and fashion and shows the visual results as artists both succumb to fashion's powerful lure and at the same time recoil from it.

Rapture surveys the collision of two glamorous and fascinating worlds: art and fashion. Whether covering an art installation in a SoHo boutique, Cindy Sherman's complicity with the tools of mass media or a Keith Haring image advertising a hip brand of vodka, and whether describing clothes as metaphor or sculpture, the use of street-art graffiti on a Louis Vuitton bag or Tracey Emin as Vivienne Westwood's model, Chris Townsend shows how the alluring, illusory faces of fashion and art are fused.