Fashion designer Christopher John Rogers was awarded the coveted American Womenswear Designer of the Year prize at the 2021 CFDA Fashion Awards that took place yesterday in New York. Telfar Clemens for Telfar excelled once again in the accessories category, while sustainability fans may be happy to know that Patagonia won the Environmental Sustainability Award and Yeohlee Teng received the Board of Directors' Tribute honor.
For several years now, Teng has been an advocate of zero waste designs, making the most of a length of fabric, and often producing garments made up of precise geometric forms assembled together to create a piece in which geometry is invisible.
In her collections she therefore often put emphasis on a mathematical and scientific approach to fashion, recycling unused pieces and piles of fabrics and integrating them in other designs.
In the past she has taken inspiration from unpredictable weather, a symptom of climate change, but, throughout the years, she remained loyal to geometrical and architectural inspirations.
The award poses one question linked with an early '80s fashion exhibition: Teng was among the designers featured in the "Intimate Architecture" exhibition that took place in 1982 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The event juxtaposed fashion and architecture, something that at the time was considered pretty cutting-edge.
Six germents by Teng, among them capes, coats, suits and dresses, were selected to be part of that exhibition: they represented syntheses of movement and stillness, light and darkness (Teng often explored contrasts of light and darkness strategically adding black lines against the icy-white panels of a coat for example), depth and surface (when marked in white, the spaces receding between pleats look as if they thrust forward in Teng's designs, creating optical illusions and three-dimensional effects).
The exhibition catalogue at the time highlighted how her forms, defined "ecclesiastical", were located in art rather than fashion.
Reducing lines to essential forms allowed indeed Teng to align with modernist sculptors such as Richard Serra (in 2017 the Phoenix Art Museum organised an exhibition that juxtaposed Yeohlee and Serra), and architects (in another exhibition Teng was compared to Malaysian architect Ken Yeang, while her Spring/Summer 2006 collection incorporated a study of suspension bridges and the work of Parisian architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, with Suspension Dresses incorporating skirts that could be hoisted with cables or straps to provide volume and surface articulation; a dress from the Autumn/Winter 2006-07 collection was instead based on catenary curves) rather than fashion designers.
At the same time, her main focus remained the body of the wearer, and the designer always refused to conform her shapes to the contours of anatomy, retaining a concern for the wearer's comfort and mobility.
Modern simplicity was embodied already in Teng's early collections that featured geometric sheaths with squares or triangles on a contrasting field of colour, while simple capes guaranteed the wearer an imposing presence.
So the question linked with this award is very simple: isn't it about time that some major museum out there would organise an exhibition about fashion and architecture? There have obviously been smaller events in museums and galleries revolving around this theme (including the "Energetics: Clothes and Enclosures" at Berlin's Aedes Gallery in 1998 and the travelling exhibition "Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture" in 2006-2007), but no blockbuster exhibition.
It would be intriguing instead to finally see a larger event that may explore how the links and connections between the two disciplines mutated throughout the years, with architecture going from a source of inspiration for many fashion designers who explored in their collections building methods, tectonic properties and a wide range of architectural concepts, to more modern collaborations between designers and architects.
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