First off I just want to be clear about this. I haven't - as they used to say on the NME letters page, and probably, for all I know, still do - even been to the gig . This is a preview of Skin and Bones, or more accurately, a review of the comments it has received so far. The show might be brilliant so it is not a reflection of that but....
The relationship between fashion and architecture (I know, I know) is a sticky one and usually follows one of three paths. So far comments about the Skin and Bones show have not bucked the trend.
The first of these is the most inane and the easiest to dismiss, which is that architects sometimes design shops for fashion designers. Herzog and De Meuron and Koolhaas for Prada and Jamie Fobert for Givenchy for example. As architects also design shops for other things this doesn't really reveal too much but it does allow for some good joint luvvying between stars of both professions. This week's Time Out goes for this angle with some excellent mutual back scratching from Thomas Hetherwick and Hussein Chalayan. Not much is revealed of the, ahem creative process, but everyone is a huge admirer of each others work, natch. The purpose of these chats is usually to safeguard the myth of some cosmic world order of genius and generally bolster the rep of anyone involved.
Leading on from this is the marginally more entertaining analysis of What Architects Wear. Hadley Freeman goes for this approach in the Guardian, starting pretty much where everybody usually does, with Zaha Hadid's taste for Issey Miyake. Again, no light is shed on the relationship except the inadvertent truism that architects tend to be fairly anal about clothes and dress the same all the time. Indeed I once saw two pictures of Erno Golfinger, separated by about forty years, in which he was wearing exactly the same clothes. But mostly, we are in the realm of shallow biography and glorified people watching.
The third and seemingly most promising connection concerns suggested similarities between the process of designing clothes and designing buildings. What's more the two are deemed to be analogous, as suggested by the shows title. A buildings structure, it is said, is like the bones of our body, 'clothed' by its cladding, or skin. This all sounds very suggestive and intriguing at first but only ever remains suggestive because the similarities are metaphorical rather than literal. I mean, yeah I get it, but still.....it's kinda not that true either. Yes, cladding could be said to be like clothes, but equally it could be said that it's not. Buildings are huge, immovable and inanimate objects, unlike bodies. Cladding panels are not in the least bit like the fabrics from which my clothes are made. A cladding that stops short to reveal the structure does not have the genuine capacity to shock as, say, a mini skirt once did. Bodies inhabit buildings, but they are not the same as them. It seems facile to pretend otherwise and to test the analogy beyond breaking point.
Worse, this kind of talk often ends up in the often vacuous world of 'organic' architecture, the idea that curves and organic shapes are somehow sensuous and of the body. From here it is usually only a short step to a Swiss Tony-ish love of buildings shaped like a beautiful woman. Again, the sheer difference between huge lumps of metal and stone bolted together and the biological complexity of the body proper only reinforce how little the two are actually alike. The initial suggestiveness of the idea gives way to a sense of the distance between them and that, if architecture does anything well it is certainly not in mimicking the human body.
There is though a more fruitful area of connection between fashion and architecture, one that resists many of the cliches listed above. This connection lies in the actual process of fashion, what you might call its operation, or, how it works.
High fashion works today almost as a pure form of post-modernism (if you'll forgive the obvious oxymoronic qualities of that). Through a process of neurotic and constant one-upmanship it recycles the past, alighting on discarded, outmoded forms and re-presents them back to us as desirable, valuable. It does this almost as a provocation. It challenges us to wear these unwanted things again, using the object's transgressive powers of revulsion to test our mettle and challenge us to see the irony, understand the sophistication behind it.
Fashion manufactures value in the most flagrant and audacious way. It recycles value-less objects and makes us pay through the nose for them. For this reason it is the most blatantly capitalist of the arts, and also the most paranoid. Fashion designers are the closest to salesmen of any artist, and they know it. For this reason, they exaggerate the tropes of artyness, always attempting to appear loftily caught up in the act of creation.
It is also, if only for these reasons, one of the most interesting art forms. Its deeply shallow (sic) ephemerality, its shameless hucksterism, the fact that is literally is the Emperor's New Clothes, makes it a challenge to authenticity and the idea that meaning is immovably located in objects of known and irrefutable value.
Architecture is big on authenticity. It is also fearful of the ephemeral. The idea that architecture itself might be susceptible to fashion, that its forms may be anything to do with mere style, is a constant threat to the conceits of architectural culture. The really interesting thing about Koolhaas' Prada store is his fashionability, the choice of him to design it, not crass analogies between glazing details and hemlines. Koolhaas knowingly transgresses boundaries of taste and acceptability, throws what we fear and despise back at us as a provocation. His work uses the grab bag of history cleverly, shifting the radical chic of one era onto the seemingly empty forms of another. The current ubiquity of his work though, his utter fashionability right now, also holds within it the potential for its own destruction. There is nothing so unfashionable, of course, as the recently fashionable.
Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture is at Somerset House, London WC2, from April 24 until August 10.
The relationship between fashion and architecture (I know, I know) is a sticky one and usually follows one of three paths. So far comments about the Skin and Bones show have not bucked the trend.
The first of these is the most inane and the easiest to dismiss, which is that architects sometimes design shops for fashion designers. Herzog and De Meuron and Koolhaas for Prada and Jamie Fobert for Givenchy for example. As architects also design shops for other things this doesn't really reveal too much but it does allow for some good joint luvvying between stars of both professions. This week's Time Out goes for this angle with some excellent mutual back scratching from Thomas Hetherwick and Hussein Chalayan. Not much is revealed of the, ahem creative process, but everyone is a huge admirer of each others work, natch. The purpose of these chats is usually to safeguard the myth of some cosmic world order of genius and generally bolster the rep of anyone involved.
Leading on from this is the marginally more entertaining analysis of What Architects Wear. Hadley Freeman goes for this approach in the Guardian, starting pretty much where everybody usually does, with Zaha Hadid's taste for Issey Miyake. Again, no light is shed on the relationship except the inadvertent truism that architects tend to be fairly anal about clothes and dress the same all the time. Indeed I once saw two pictures of Erno Golfinger, separated by about forty years, in which he was wearing exactly the same clothes. But mostly, we are in the realm of shallow biography and glorified people watching.
The third and seemingly most promising connection concerns suggested similarities between the process of designing clothes and designing buildings. What's more the two are deemed to be analogous, as suggested by the shows title. A buildings structure, it is said, is like the bones of our body, 'clothed' by its cladding, or skin. This all sounds very suggestive and intriguing at first but only ever remains suggestive because the similarities are metaphorical rather than literal. I mean, yeah I get it, but still.....it's kinda not that true either. Yes, cladding could be said to be like clothes, but equally it could be said that it's not. Buildings are huge, immovable and inanimate objects, unlike bodies. Cladding panels are not in the least bit like the fabrics from which my clothes are made. A cladding that stops short to reveal the structure does not have the genuine capacity to shock as, say, a mini skirt once did. Bodies inhabit buildings, but they are not the same as them. It seems facile to pretend otherwise and to test the analogy beyond breaking point.
Worse, this kind of talk often ends up in the often vacuous world of 'organic' architecture, the idea that curves and organic shapes are somehow sensuous and of the body. From here it is usually only a short step to a Swiss Tony-ish love of buildings shaped like a beautiful woman. Again, the sheer difference between huge lumps of metal and stone bolted together and the biological complexity of the body proper only reinforce how little the two are actually alike. The initial suggestiveness of the idea gives way to a sense of the distance between them and that, if architecture does anything well it is certainly not in mimicking the human body.
There is though a more fruitful area of connection between fashion and architecture, one that resists many of the cliches listed above. This connection lies in the actual process of fashion, what you might call its operation, or, how it works.
High fashion works today almost as a pure form of post-modernism (if you'll forgive the obvious oxymoronic qualities of that). Through a process of neurotic and constant one-upmanship it recycles the past, alighting on discarded, outmoded forms and re-presents them back to us as desirable, valuable. It does this almost as a provocation. It challenges us to wear these unwanted things again, using the object's transgressive powers of revulsion to test our mettle and challenge us to see the irony, understand the sophistication behind it.
Fashion manufactures value in the most flagrant and audacious way. It recycles value-less objects and makes us pay through the nose for them. For this reason it is the most blatantly capitalist of the arts, and also the most paranoid. Fashion designers are the closest to salesmen of any artist, and they know it. For this reason, they exaggerate the tropes of artyness, always attempting to appear loftily caught up in the act of creation.
It is also, if only for these reasons, one of the most interesting art forms. Its deeply shallow (sic) ephemerality, its shameless hucksterism, the fact that is literally is the Emperor's New Clothes, makes it a challenge to authenticity and the idea that meaning is immovably located in objects of known and irrefutable value.
Architecture is big on authenticity. It is also fearful of the ephemeral. The idea that architecture itself might be susceptible to fashion, that its forms may be anything to do with mere style, is a constant threat to the conceits of architectural culture. The really interesting thing about Koolhaas' Prada store is his fashionability, the choice of him to design it, not crass analogies between glazing details and hemlines. Koolhaas knowingly transgresses boundaries of taste and acceptability, throws what we fear and despise back at us as a provocation. His work uses the grab bag of history cleverly, shifting the radical chic of one era onto the seemingly empty forms of another. The current ubiquity of his work though, his utter fashionability right now, also holds within it the potential for its own destruction. There is nothing so unfashionable, of course, as the recently fashionable.
Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture is at Somerset House, London WC2, from April 24 until August 10.
3 comments:
I once saw two pictures of Erno Golfinger, separated by about forty years, in which he was wearing exactly the same clothes.
Ah, my hero...the point, surely, is that he looked brilliant in both cases, and I bet it was a new cravat, just exactly like the old one.
Incidentally, on the Swiss Tony front, read ANY interview with Oskar Niemeyer...'the curves! are like the curves of the beloved woman! the curves of the mountains of Brazil! The concrete curves, are like concrete breasts!' etc, etc. Oddly, I find this quite charming, although I might not if it weren't coming from a 100-year old Communist. Plus I presume you've read The Atrocity Exhibition...?
actually it was a pair of jumbo cords, a lumberjack shirt and a sort of leather waistcoat/jerkin thing. kind of austere intellectul meets canadian logger. probably his at home look - he was pictured in his hampstead house. strangely dapper too.
actually i was thinking of niemeyer when i wrote that. he is oddly more acceptable in his (communist) dotage than someone like future systems who should, frankly, know better. actually, calatrava is the worst, and a bit dead ringers about it all too.
i have read AE - a long time ago though. i liked the assassination of jfk as downhill motor race bit. does he write about fashion and architecture?
No, it was with ref to Swiss Tony. I quote:
Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomise the Festival Hall?
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