Skin + Bones exhibition, London@Fashion

Installation shot showing designs by (from left to right) McQueen, Yamamoto, Westwood and Yamamoto again.
Dress from Westwood's Anglomania collection, Autumn/Winter '93
Installation shot showing the ability to construct volume in fashion with designs by (from left to right) Watanabe, Chalayan and Elbaz for Lanvin.
Installation shot of the new exhibition space in the old barge, stable and workshop quarters of Somerset House.
Constructing volume in fashion: Hussein Chalayan, Tulle Dress #2 from Before Minus Now collection, Spring/Summer 2000.
Structure and movement in fashion: Boudicca, Black Lowry ensemble from Invisible City collection, Autumn/Winter 1994-1995.
Tectonic wrapping in fashion: Boudicca, Black Lowry ensemble from Invisible City collection, Autumn/Winter 1994-1995.
Tectonic wrapping in architecture: Frank Gehry, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California, 2003
Constructing volume in architecture: Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama International Port terminal, Japan, 2002
Structure and movement in architecture: Future Systems, Selfridges Department store, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 1999.

It’s been a while since one could justifiably talk about fashion, art, architecture or design without mentioning one of the other disciplines in the same sentence. Whether this is a development of more fertile cultural exchange between disciplines or a reflection of the contemporary trend to homogenise as much as possible is perhaps irrelevant. What’s important are the interesting results increasingly thrown up time and again when different disciplines collide.

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, a new exhibition at London’s Somerset House, is one such attempt to demystify how these two creative disciplines no longer operate in a cultural vacuum. Coinciding with a book of the same name, the exhibition charts from 1980 to the present day the increasingly shared dialogue between fashion designers and architects through the work of over fifty contemporary pioneers.

The fashion on show is a mix of high concept and high drama: Chalayan, McQueen, Miyake, Comme, Viktor + Rolf and Westwood together with architects of a similar calibre: Gehry, Hadid, OMA and Herzog & de Meuron to name just a few. It might seem outlandish to try and draw parallels between the two – but this is precisely where the exhibition succeeds. Rather than forcing similarities with grand, academic texts, the visuals are left to speak for themselves.

Both architects and designers are preoccupied with space, volume and providing a cover for the body, a protection from the environment and a vehicle for social and cultural comment. And these are the kernels at the heart of the exhibition, presented thematically with garments or catwalk videos on one side and architectural parallels opposite.

So the tectonic wrapping at play in Boudicca's mid-Nineties couture collections is remarkably similar to Gehry's Disney Concert Hall in LA of the early Noughties. The heightened drapery of Westwood and Yamamoto's collections of a couple of years back bear a striking resemblance to much of Hadid's work, whilst the constructed volume of Chalayan and Watanabe's Noughties collections shares much with the work of Foreign Office Architects of the same period. The similarities go on. Often the only significant differences are related to scale and material.

Clare Catterall, the Somerset House curator of the exhibition explains this trend as part of a growing energy and increased synergy between the shared language of architects and fashion designers. ‘Visual culture is very energetic at the moment,’ says Catterall, ‘but I think this exhibition is so timely because it’s only recently that architects have started to embrace fashion and vice versa. Designers are speaking a conceptual language that is very close if not identical to that of architects and hence the two work hand in hand – look at Prada and OMA, for example.’

Skin + Bones comes to London from Tokyo and prior to this Los Angeles, curated by Brooke Hodges of the LAMoCA. But its arrival in London marks the opening of a new exhibition programme and at Somerset House, headed by Catterall called the Embankment Galleries programme. Based in a new space, the old barge house of the historic venue, the aim is to focus on exhibitions of a more contemporary, conceptual nature. Catterall elaborates, ‘we’re looking to bring something distinctive to the melting pot of London’s cultural scene by showing ideas-based exhibitions that challenge viewers to think for themselves.’ And given the increasing proliferation of creative crossover the programme couldn't have come at a riper time. It's very much a case of watch this space...

@Source: Wallpaper.com 23 April 2008 | Fashion