Wear:Where? The Convergent Geographies of Architecture and Fashion

Abstract

Fabric, materiality, tissue, construction, sculpture, silhouette, model. The convergent vocabularies and practices of both fashion and architectural design are argued to offer important insights into the relational geographies of the contemporary city. The temporalities, techniques, rhythms, and spaces of fashion and architecture might be intuitively imagined as starkly different—the first fast, pliable, delicate, and embodied; the second slow, solid, rigid, permanent. However, I suggest that both practices are centrally engaged in the creation of urban environments that question our notions of time, space, form, fit, interactivity, and mobility. Focusing on a number of fashion projects, including Chanel, Prada, Lucy Orta, and Comme des Garçons, the paper explores the ways in which the architecture of fashion is centrally concerned with questions of colour, sensory experience, transience, display, and erasure. New fashion spaces offer transformative possibilities for the ways in which we inhabit and understand the built urban form. They reveal the limits and possibilities of materiality and open up a physical and metaphorical space through which to revision the politics of consumption. Boldly, perhaps, I suggest that this exercise in disciplinary boundary crossing has the potential to transform the way in which we envision accommodation, habitation, interaction, space, and the city, creating and sustaining our wider social landscape and revealing new desires and possibilities for progressive and socially inclusive urban design, polity, and policy. In short, to unite in a mutual desire to design a world that is a better place in which to live.