Anna Zwick’s body traps

As stated in previous posts on this blog, the fashion and architecture connection intrigues me since I find rather interesting the way some designers transfer into their creations the inspirations, sharp lines, forms and silhouettes of particular architects.

While it's not so rare for fashion designers to choose architecture as their source of inspiration, I rarely found designers inspired by medical conditions.

Yet New York-based designer and Parsons The New School for Design graduate Anna Zwick’s explored in her Autumn/Winter designs the locked in syndrome, a condition that leaves the body paralysed but the mental facilities intact.

The inspiration for this collection came from writer, journalist and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby.

In 1995 Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma. When he woke up he was completely paralysed and dictated by blinking his autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly from which the eponymous film directed by Julian Schnabel was also taken.

In French, the common term that indicates the locked in syndrome is "maladie de l'emmuré vivant", that literally means “walled-in alive disease”, and I think this definition really suits Zwick’s collection.

The designer created voluminous structures that envelope and engulf the body. The palette employed, featuring a rather classic combination of pale pinks and soft greys, seems to contrast with the distorted padded motifs that, rather than cocooning and protecting the body, provide it with cumbersome armours and give it grotesque shapes.

While some garments such as trousers and tops adhere to traditional construction techniques, others such as cropped jackets and coats or mini-dresses, abandon such techniques completely, distorting the traditional demarcations of breasts, waist, hips and derriere and creating additive structures, asymmetrical cages aimed at maximising some parts of the body or alter others.

Zwick’s pieces make me think a lot about Rei Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection for Comme des Garçons “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” that challenged notions of traditional body silhouettes by adding pads and bumps in unexpected areas of the body.

Through such pieces in stretch nylon-urethane fabric and down pad, Kawakubo created a sort of new aesthetics.

In the same way, Zwick created a different kind of aesthetics, but with one main difference: apart from contributing to give the human body a sort of abstract sculpture look, Zwick's bumps, curves and padded areas also add to the collection an emotional level, connected with a dramatic medical condition.

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