My family has a long-standing connection with car crashes. Thank God we are not accident-prone, but my dad worked for an insurance company, assessing the damages that occurred to cars and to their drivers after an accident. So stacks of pictures of car crashes have always been lying around the house and, after dad died three years ago, we were left with boxes and boxes of road accidents involving cars, scooters, tractors and bicycles, spanning roughly four decades. Number plates, doors, lights, fenders you name a part of a car we have it, all of them smashed, crumpled, bent, destroyed or just slightly damaged.
I realise it sounds rather sinister of me saying it, but some of them, especially the black and white car crashes from the '60s and '70s, are rather fascinating as they also chronicle the development of car design through the years. There are also funnier selections of images that my dad made by chance, mistakenly taking new pictures of crashes on a film he had already used, ending up creating bizarre collages of car parts.
After dad died we were faced with a dilemma: what to do with our extensive collection of car crashes? My brother would have loved to do an exhibition with some of the best images, but we still haven't had the time to select the, well, "best ones" out of all the pictures we have. While going over these pictures once again yesterday I started secretly wishing we had lent my dad's archive to Hussein Chalayan.
I have already declared in a previous post my admiration for Chalayan as I consider him one of those rare designers who manage to amaze fashionistas while at the same time inspiring them to ponder a bit on the times we are living in through his symbolism and clever creations. In his most recent Spring/Summer 09 collection, the designer invited us to think about high speed lifestyles and their direct consequence, a final and doomed crash.
Other designers might have found difficult to come up with iconic but still wearable creations with such a theme, but this wasn’t the case with Chalayan. His mini-dresses had hand-painted prints of crushed cars complete with plates, taken from car grave pictures. The print worked at its best on the most rigid and body-conscious dresses or trouser suits and jackets that seemed to protect the models as if they were pieces of automobile body work, but it amazingly gave an incredible look also to the most ethereal chiffon pieces such as evening gowns and blouses.
A conceptual touch was added by Chalayan by freezing some of his sculptural dresses in technological materials in aerodynamic motion. At the very end of his Paris show, a group of girls stood on a revolving platform, the spikes protruding from the back of their dresses were frozen in mid-air as if caught in a pre/post-collision space/time vortex while wine glasses at the back of the catwalk were smashed to recreate the terrible sounds of a fatal collision.
Inspired by Chalayan I'm now thinking that while an exhibition of my dad's car crashes would be very interesting, it would even be more intriguing to have the images scanned, chop them up a bit, remix them and try to come up with interesting digital prints for clothes and accessories. As much as it sounds surreal, I know my father would have liked it.
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It's a bit morbid, but it is quite fascinating as well. Indeed, seeing the old car crash pictures can be informative. Comparing how damaged older models are to new ones tell a story of how automobiles have evolved over the years.
Posted by: Alecia Longsworth | December 26, 2011 at 03:53 PM