The Errant Æsthete

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. MORE…