Frocks and Blocks

[Thurman, Judith. “Frocks & Blocks”. The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 2006]

An Article Review

The “Skin+Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” Exhibit in MOCA, put on several years ago tried to relate the field of architecture with that of fashion. By juxtaposing similar building projects with their couture counterparts, similarities begin to emerge. However, the extent of how much they relate is the crux of the debate. Thurman asserts that the exhibit too readily complies with this establishment of relations, saying that the affinities are only through semantics. She then goes on to descriptively list some pairings of edifice-ensemble displays:

Cables: Yeohlee Teng’s Suspension Dress with Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette
Pleats: Alber Elbaz’s pleated day dress with Winka Dubbeldam’s Greenwich Street Project
Lace: Tess Giberson’s abstract crochet with Toyo Ito’s Mikimoto Tower
Composites: Martin Mangiela’s disjointed patchwork with Gehry’s anarchic jigsaw
Angles: Viktor & Rolf’s cantilevered shirt collars with Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Firestation

All of these seem true enough at their surface, but the two disciplines are none the less still really non-proportional to each other. And there is a good point taken when Thurman writes that most fashion retrospectives within major art institutions are mostly just about honouring a style, period, or couturier, whereas this is trying to do something a bit more. The curator of Architecture and Design of MOCA, Brooke Hodge, notes that this exhibit couldn’t have even happened ten years ago. This was only possible because the gap between the two fields has slowly tapered in recent times, and architects have finally started to relax the modernist teachings of form follows function. As Hodge says: “the younger generation tends to know more about fashion than designers know about architecture. They’ve grown up with its influence, and the question of legitimacy doesn’t arise.” Basically, we architects have gotten off our high horse and started to realize we can all benefit from each other. Bikinis to burkas, screens to walls, they all just mediate public and private zones to varying degrees of enticement to austerity.

But after reading the article, I’ve come to realize this:

All the hype around connecting the dots between both disciplines into this hybrid mesh of some new product is an irrelevant effort. No matter how stimulating the dialogue between the two discipline – issues of body as site, shelter and identity – they will never parallel each other. They can approach some sort of complementary state within each other’s spheres of influence, but to say that one is a metaphor for the other just cannot be. For one thing, architecture is at its most basic level a search for permanence. It has a gravitas that the fashion world would never even fathom of nearing. It is the ephemerality of the flesh and its qualities that makes fashion visceral, whereas architecture is about the creation of the void to occupy. Tectonic strategies are interesting to co-relate between the two fields and as long as society has clothed themselves and lived under roofs, no one has contested that both fields are able to convey status and encode identity. But that can be said about any commodity-based industry, with some examples as the automobile one drives or the class they fly in. The interesting thing is, as it has become “de rigueur” for luxury fashion houses to commission starchitects to design their flagship epicentres, so is the notion that aesthetic coherence has been transmitted from one artist to another. Bernard Arnault of LVMH sought out Frank Gehry for their contemporary art centre, while Francois Pinault of P.P.R., owner of the Gucci Group, hired Tadao Ando for their building. But this pairing off of architect and designer is not an entirely new phenomenon. The past has had many architects paired with kings and rulers, of whom dictated the fashions of the day. But again, design aesthetic pairing of the like-minded does not give rise of equals. Take a look at this formula of architecture to fashion I’ve developed, as a modification with what Thurman asserted in the article:


It explains that the cultural prestige of architecture is approximately inversely proportional to the name recognition of its main exemplar as compared with fashion’s multiplied by the money spent on advertising and marketing, all over the variable of time. This is to say it applies to the case of the general public. So in another sense, one could say that architecture and fashion are two very different languages that developed from the same root. And they are both used for communication and expression of self, but often times when they try to communicate with each other, things are lost in translation.