I have neglected for a while posts about architecture and fashion, so I’ll reopen the thread today, inspired by Mint Designs’s Autumn/Winter 2010-11 collection presented a few days ago at Tokyo Fashion Week.
The designers behind this brand, Hokuto Katsui and Nao Yagi, are famous for their colourful and clashing prints, though for the next Autumnal season they seem to have opted for a more muted palette and a rather controlled geometric pattern.
Indeed the latter - reproduced on shirts, light trench coats, ample and long skirts or fitted dresses in black on white or orange background - borrowed a lot from architecture.
In the garments incorporating blown up prints, the black graphic lines seemed to represent a series of frames and beams.
The garments with zoomed out images of the same print allowed instead to discover minimalist images of little houses that were sort of crossovers between the architecture of Elizabethan buildings and cute little houses from fairy tale stories.
The fairy element of the collection was also integrated in other designs, in particular in the long dresses on with prints that spelt the words “Fairy Tale” all over the garment.
It was interesting to note how the same images provided clever ideas for surface treatment: in one dress the bold graphic lines of the prints literally spilled out of the contours and hems of the garment, surrealistically turning into ribbons that were left hanging.
In this way the print was turned into a sort of optical illusion that contributed to distort the reality.
The same architectural distortion of the reality was applied to the headgear that featured piles of beams precarious piled up on the models’ heads.
Quite a few fashion designers are driven by the will of "making architecture" through their work, finding new solutions in contemporary techniques and creating pieces that somehow reflect or contrast with the environment that surrounds us.
This is not only a prerogative of people making clothes, though: there are many accessory designers focusing on creating pieces inspired by architecture, among them also Nicole Brundage.
While for her main line the Texas-born and Milan-based footwear designer opted for a retro edge, for her Acrobats of God’s A/W 2010 collection Brundage explored the possibilities offered by flexibility and movement, wrapping the foot in wool, velvet and lame elastic strips and creating in this way through the intrecciato technique a sort of architectural stratification.
You can read more about Brundage’s new collections and work in my interview with her for Dazed Digital.
In the meantime, for today, why not pondering a little bit on the role that architectural techniques play in fashion design and on how they can be considered a mean to achieve new fashion purposes and create innovative results?
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