Beauty in Decay

There wasn't much time to do some proper sightseeing while in Trieste for the ITS#TEN and that was a shame, but I still managed to squeeze in a sort of (well, unexpected) architectural trip while going to see the Biennale 2011 exhibition (to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italy's Unity this year there are exhibitions connected with the Venice Art Biennale all over the country).

I must admit that, while the place wasn't too far from our hotel and I love walking, doing it for roughly 45 minutes under the sun and in a rather high temperature wasn't such a great idea.

So I'm going to use this post also to officially saying sorry to Jan Van Mol from the global creative platform Addictlab (please, creatives reading this, check it out because it's a very useful platform for all of you) for dragging him along.

After 3 minutes into our trip I also started displaying the sort of annoying maniacal frenzy for taking pictures of buildings that would drive your fellow travellers completely crazy if you were in a group, but the more we walked, the more both Jan and I started spotting inspiring buildings, especially in the old harbour area (and that sort of made us forget about our trip under the sun…).

The best ones were the warehouses near the Biennale building (Magazzino 26) with their rusty metal elements, broken windows and decaying brickwork.

In a way it felt a lot like walking around a ghost town (also because the other visitors, being more clever than myself, opted for a bus trip there, so nobody was actually walking around these parts…).

These buildings are still standing today as a testament to industrial architecture from the 1800s: they are rather peculiar since their structures, created using advanced techniques and building materials, were inspired by the Lagerhäuser system of Northern European ports.

While there was a sort of sublime beauty (think about what Edmund Burke says about beauty in his seminal A Philosphical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful…), fashion-wise the rusty and decayed elements in the buildings made me think about surface eleborations on fabrics, and mainly brought to mind Hussein Chalayan's graduate collection "The Tangent Flows" (1993) with its garments made with fabric the designer had buried in a friend’s garden with some rusted iron pieces to study the concepts of change and decay, and Kei Kagami's "Flying U-Boat" installation, with metal powder staining the surface of the dress that was also red-rusted by salt water. Can you think about other fashion collections inspired by rust and decay?

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