Somerset House is a beautiful setting to examine the visual and conceptual ideas that unite fashion and architecture during the period from the 1980's to the present day. The show features more than 200 works by over 50 internationally renowned architects and fashion designers including:

Fashion:

Boudicca, Hussein Chalayan, Comme des Garcons, Martin Margiele, Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake, Viktor & Rolf, Junya Watanabe, Vivienne Westwood and Yohji Yamamoto.

 
     

Architecture:

Shigeru Ban, Future Systems, Foreign Office Architects, Gehry Partners, Thomas Heatherwick, Herzog & de Meuron, Toyo Ito, Enrique Miralles Benedetta Tagliabue/EMBT Arquitectes, OMA and Zaha Hadid.

It examines new thresholds particularly in the 1990s and beyond with the rise to prominence in the 1980s of designers such as Comme des Garcons, Yohji, Yamamoto and Issey Miyake.

The whole exhibition challenges accepted boundaries and celebrates a more radical approach to the fashion design which in turn has directly influenced a new generation of designers such as Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan and Viktor & Rolf.

The dark ambience of the exhibition and the use of various multi media tools to engage with the attendee all added to the excitement of the exhibition but what was really impressive was the actual use of the garments to demonstrate and illustrate new architectural lines and similar the use of new architecture developments to inspire today's fashion artists.

For those of you who are seeking inspiration for a new collection, undertaking a final year thesis or really into a highly stylised exhibition this is the place to go. A bit dark in places but excellently laid out and executed this exhibition ranks upon open for the best we have reviewed to date.

There are some excellent snippets of information available too which are perfect for studying and improving comprehension on architectural inspired fashion of today.

The exhibition explores that the core function of "Shelter" – building provide shelter and the prime function of clothing is also to provide the body with shelter. In recent years fashion designers and architects have begun to reinvent this fundamental aspect of design to reflect change in our environment and society.

Fashion designers are reassessing clothing's potential to address the needs of the modern urban nomad using high performance fabrics, and incorporating ideas of production; at the same time architects are questioning the roles of bricks and mortar structures using new materials and techniques to create more versatile and ecological structures that can respond to humanitarian needs.

The exhibition went on to review various subsections of the design process using garments and building models to illustrate the perspectives.

Tectonic Strategies

Increasingly fashion designers and architects are sharing techniques of construction. Architects are looking to fashion and the techniques of dress making such as pleating and draping to achieve more complex forms out of land materials, while fashion designers are employing engineering methods such as cantilever and suspension to create elaborate and often architectonic garments using fabric.

Folding

Since the early 1990s folding used by architects is a device to create greater visual impact through dramatic effects of light and shadow on a buildings exterior surface and to manipulate the volume of the interior.

Cantilever

Traditionally the province of engineers and architects cantilever forms have been borrowed by fashion designers to articulate the surface of garments, manipulate volume and create dramatic silhouettes.

Fashion designers have also borrowed the principles of suspension from architectural engineering – suspension. This can refer to the way the pieces of fabric seem to hang in the final garment or held together by almost indiscernible layers of hand-stitching. It can also relate to a system of cables that hoist the fabric in a way that relates to the engineering of a suspension bridge.

This process amplifies volume and has various techniques available such as box pleating, pencil line pleating, sunray et al. The greatest advocate of such pleating techniques is the master maestro himself Issey Miyake who introduced new individual pleating technique such as those used to create the Pleats Please collection.

Printing

Some architects have chosen to wrap some buildings in exuberant printed motifs often to lend a narrative element to the structure reflecting its identity or the context of its use in the same way.

Structural Skin

In both fashion and architecture designers have recently begun to develop structural skins that bring the surface and the structure of design – or the skin and bones – together so they become one and the same thing. Structure and façade become joined in a single surface.

Constricting Volume

Both fashion designers and architects deal with creating space and volume out of two dimensional materials albeit on different scales.  Increasingly with the aid of new technologies and materials each has been able to develop shared techniques that provide texture from volume in new and intriguing ways often introducing shapes and silhouettes that confound existing ideas of properties and form. Surprisingly the new shapes in each discipline seem to find echoes in one another.

So to summarise the event the words of Elena Manferdini were succinctly used:

‘The Body is a perfect small scale exercise in spatial design, a testing ground for ideas and techniques to apply to building'

And further supported by the words of Testa & Weiser:

‘We are all mates operating the same terrain, and drawing on craft and technology. We develop our own tools, share software and are challenged to work with new materials.'

Jenny Holloway