The Art of Cloth
Danielle Augusta Cannon
Francis Bacon said: "Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse." Not only did Donna Karan’s "Skin Tight: The Sensibility of the Flesh" exhibition and Issey Miyake’s "A-POC" showcase extremely artistic clothing, but each event also illuminated how much Karan and Miyake seek to use fabric as a medium of social commentary.
"Skin Tight," at the Weiss Studio in New York, showed that fashion isn’t always superficial. The catalogue boasted that the exhibition "pushes the boundaries of fashion to cross dialogues with other disciplines like art, politics, and sociology, situating fashion centrally in the interpretation and expression of our world." Hussein Chalayan’s piece in the exhibition, a reflection on refugees called "AfterWords" (2000-2001), shows upholstery transformed into dresses, chairs into suitcases, and a coffee table unfolding to become a skirt. Chalayan asks how altering one’s surroundings alters one as a person, and to what extent the things we own really own us.
This theme is also found in the work of Viktor + Rolf, visual artists who work with clothes. Their video installation Russian Doll documents a show in which they layer garments on a model until she is completely smothered in clothing, immobilized. White shows a collection of only white garments, while Bluescreen shows models wearing blue clothes that have video images of urban and natural landscapes projected onto them.
In 1992, Issey Miyake showed "Issey Miyake ’92 Twist" at Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, and from 1998 to 2000, his work was featured at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris, the Ace Gallery in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. The recent A-POC exhibition in Tribeca featured Miyake’s work, as well as the work of his protégé, Dai Fujiwara. A-POC, standing for A-Piece Of Cloth, is a new form of technology developed by Miyake and Fujiwara. The clothes are woven into continuous tubes of fabric and the wearer then cuts them out, participating in their final design. Comparisons have been made with the revolutions in furniture design in the 1920s, when easily manipulable steel tubes were developed. Miyake has written of A-POC: "Once again our society is poised to make dramatic changes based upon developments in science and technology. Will fashion be able to afford to keep the same old methodology? I have endeavored to experiment, to make fundamental changes to the system of making clothes." Based on their history and the duo’s presentation of A-POC in Tribeca, it seems that Miyake and Fujiwara will continue to incorporate a vital artistic sensibility within their designs.
