TEL AVIV.- Clothes reflect people's passions, social preferences and personalities, and enable us to probe into a given social texture. Garments and jewelry, as well as the design of one's living environment in general, bear characteristics of power, gender and human condition.

During the twentieth century, and especially during the last decades, the relationship between fashion and fine art has tightened. Fashion designers are influenced by works of art, quote them in the clothes they design and respond to them. Artists, too, respond in their works to fashionable trends, consumer culture, body images and other related issues, that have to do with personal and social identities.

The course Body Oriented Textile Design has been conducted for two years jointly by the department of Textile Design in Shenkar College and by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The course, which integrates art, fashion and textile design, aims at developing new, original textile materials, which will allow for expressive effects through properties such as softness, stiffness, transparency, colorfulness, flexibility and various kinds of texture. These creative, original fabrics, are part of the dialogue between art and fashion. The course students design avant-garde clothing items, inspired by twentieth century works of art exhibited in the Moshe and Sara Mayer Collection and in the Mizne-Blumental Collection of Tel Aviv Museum of Art. As Dudu Gavrieli, Shenkar course instructor, says, "Choosing fine art as a source of inspiration is not accidental. Studying works of art and their cultural contexts is a basic tool in the process of fashion design, and an integral part of the textile designer's world".

The collaboration between the two institutions is led by Adi Kats Shapira, director of the department of education, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Uri Zeig, head of the textile department, Shenkar College; Dudo Gavrieli, course instructor of Body Oriented Textile Design, Shenkar; Sasha Kanin, technical instructor; Ziva Koort, senior lecturer, Tel Aviv Museum of Art;