An exhibition titled "Skin Bones" would usually belong inside a natural history or science museum. But this November at MOCA, LA's only contemporary art museum, it's an anatomically correct moniker for a show that examines the relationship between fashion's most radical clothing and some of the world's groundbreaking contemporary architectural structures.
Fully titled Skin Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, the exhibit is grounded in the similarities and the symbiosis between fashion and architecture. Notwithstanding differences in size, "both [clothing and building] are based on the body, provide shelter, and are means of projecting identity," says Brooke Hodge, curator of the show and of the department of Architecture and Design at MOCA. Additionally, "because both fashion designers and architects begin with a flat material (fabric or building materials which generally come in a flat, rather than curved, form), they realized that each could look to [the] other for ways to construct more complex forms," Hodge explains. This intriguing relationship will be investigated through the main components that both designers and architects use to realize their designs: "skin," the façade, and "bones," the infrastructure. Set in an environment conceived by Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown, the exhibit "unites clothes and representations of architecture (models, computer animations, full-scale mockups, photographs, drawings, etc.) for the first time in a [major] museum exhibition." And since it is in Los Angeles, a city where status is paramount, Skin Bones will showcase works from the most influential contemporary designers.
On the fashion front, the selection comes from some of the most revered and innovative sartorialists: Hussein Chalayan's fiberglass Aeroplane Dress, which comes with a remote control, a tulle dress that resembles a topiary, and a tableau from his Afterwords collection in which a skirt transforms into a table; Viktor and Rolf's rigid, multi-layered blouse; Yeohlee's precise and geometrically referenced silk pieces; Azzedine Alaïa's lascivious bandage dress; a camouflage coat and bustle skirt from Yohji Yamamoto; pieces from Junya Watanabe's wonderfully inventive Techno Couture collection; Martin Margiela's dress made of different swatches of fabric; an extensive and carefully considered selection from Comme des Garçons' collections circa the late '90s; a graphic dress from architecture-loving modernist Narciso Rodriguez; for the first time in the US, Italian Nanni Strada's technology-centric threads; and Olivier Theyskens' romantic column-gowns, which will leave you reminiscing of his heyday at Rochas.
Todays "it" creative rockstars, so-called "starchitects" are well represented: from the Centre Pompidou collection is Shigeru Ban's Tokyo Curtain Wall House, which, in Hodge's words, "deals with both draping and shelter simultaneously;" Rem Koolhaas/OMA's Seattle Public Library; MIT Architecture Professor J. Meejin Yoon's Mobius-dress, which wraps the body with a sizable mobius strip; Future Systems' (the London-based team that designed the Commes des Garçons style sanctums) Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England; Herzog and de Meuron's beehivesque Prada Tokyo store and a nest-shaped stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics; Foreign Office Architects' Yokohama International Port Terminal; 2004 Prizker Prize winner Zaha Hadid's sharply angled Vitra Fire Station; Toyo Ito's TOD's Omotesando Building, wrapped with concrete and polygonal glass panels in varying sizes; and Bernard Tschumi's eye-catching Parc de La Villette in Paris.
Contemplating her efforts to bring the relationship between fashion and architecture to the forefront of culture, Hodge says, "I hope that the work presented will provide further inspiration for both fashion designers and architects, and to students as well, by suggesting strategies that may be adopted or applied from one discipline to the other."