Mark Rothko meets Balenciaga

This Balenciaga skirt reminds me of a more refined Mark Rothko painting.
Rothko here:





The first time I saw Rothko paintings in the flesh was at the MOMA in New York. It might at first seem easy, without much knowledge of his work, to dismiss it as mindless and childish but after some time and information, you may find yourself feeling suspicion of them, and having them imprinted on your mind, several minutes after you stop viewing them. I realized that they're meant as instalments, not as an intention to imitate the physical realm of reality.
Other modern classic, abstract expressionists from the mid 20th century have more explicit imagery that can "be explored," so to speak.
However, this doesn't go to say that there isn't power in his work. "Real" art cannot possibly be characterized by the human ability to understand what it intends to implore.
After some dabbling in more literal forms of expressionism, he realized that post-war artists were polite and accurate in the assumption that at this point in time, the human body could not be fairly depicted unless it was mutilated.
From that point on, he reduced his literal forms to more vague shapes and images.
Eventually, he realized that all he ever really wanted to do was depict emotion anyways - grief, loss, ecstasy, etc which led him to his most unique and recognizable style.
This is the time when the above paintings were created.
Language cannot even precisely represent such a vague thing as emotion, and he really believed that painting was another medium through which to try.
People would weep in the face of his paintings, and those are the people that he painted for. He actually accepted a commission from the Four Seasons Hotel on the bottom floor of the Seagram building for $2.5 million, spent a number of years completing it, and after having one meal there, rejected the offer. He believed that nobody who would pay so much for a meal could possibly appreciate or even notice the effort of his art.
Say what you will about Mark Rothko (and please don't draw your conclusions based on these thumbnails), but he had such a breath-taking, bleak and sad angle of human emotion during a period of pop-art, that focused on human beings, not on the world at large.