A lot has been happening in the last few days education and research-wise in my life. The most interesting thing was discovering on a long and extremely interesting session last Friday afternoon the work of the students part of the "Building Fashion" course at the AA School in Paris (28 students - 24 different nationalities, most of them architecture students or already practising architects, well done!).
While presenting their projects and studies they showed a focus and a thirst for research that - I'm very sorry to say - fashion students often lack.
In a way, this is not even the fault of fashion design students or of their lecturers, but it is the fault of the media, constantly telling us about the latest trends, the latest celebrity wearing this or that garment and the latest "must have" accessory.
The "Building Fashion" students - divided in three different studios, "Self-Assembled Prêt-à-Porter Studio" by Jorge Ayala and Riyad Joucka, "Encoded Augmentations" by Djordje Stojanovic and "Stereo Vogue" by Julia Koerner and Adam Vukmanov - showed instead you don't have to constantly read fashion magazines and look at fashion sites that tell you about the latest trends to develop new ideas and researches.
Some of them moved indeed from a simple image of themselves sitting down and then standing up, developing from their leg movements lines that projected into space and created planar projections charging the space around them and creating in this way volumes that can be applied to garments.
There were students inspired by anatomy or body exaggerations or who studied medical conditions such as ossification or developed werable buildings that moved from spines; others focused instead on creating expanding structures with basic elements or explored the possibilities that one material such as fibreglass mesh can provide when subjected to different processes.
On Saturday afternoon, after my lecture, students also engaged in a very interesting discussion, criticising the fashion system and wondering how we could make it better by merging it with the architectural practice in a healthy way (possibly avoiding the star architect/star fashion designer equation that would only result in more ego-maniacal behaviours, but pushing fashion designers and architects to collaborate together and look at ways to use the two disciplines to make our lives better...).
Special thanks go to the AA School in Paris for inviting me, to all the students for introducing me to their great work and, last but not least, to French knitwear designer Xavier Brisoux who made a guest appearance during my lecture explaining the architectural connections behind some of his designs from his Spring/Summer 2012 men and women's wear collections (and in particular behind the design at the end of this post). And if you think that knitwear can't be architectural, well, remember that Luca Coelli from iconic Italian/American '80s knitwear duo Pour Toi was actually an architect.
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