Project for an Architecture and Fashion Event

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In a recently published article, the New York Times lamented the fact that the "Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art wasn't a blockbuster as the McQueen event (according to the article, attendance at Schiap/Prada hit 339,838 against 661,509 viewers – though the McQueen event was extended twice and also received more publicity for obvious reasons).

But the main point when you're organising an exhibition is not numbers or quantity, but quality and the way an event can inspire and engage visitors. Quite a few fashion exhibitions organised in the last few years apart from focusing on one fashion house or designer (less expensive choice, in a way, since you only have to look for specific materials in specific collections and you don't borrow from different collectors/museums) were based on the principle of attracting a lot of visitors and hitting record-breaking numbers. Yet, while interesting or exciting, they didn't manage to actively stimulate visitors beyond the "let me take a picture of this display with my mobile phone for a cool tweet and then we can go"-stage.

I think the time has come to go back to more complex exhibitions that look at different aspects of different designers/fashion houses or that mix at least two disciplines together (by the way, the image illustrating this post shows a piece from Gianfranco Ferré's Autumn/Winter 1984-85, showcased during the '80s in New York at an exhibition exploring creativity in Italian design).

My choice - but I'm biased here - would be to relaunch a major exhibition looking at fashion and architecture and tackling issues such as shapes, construction and materials. The latest event along these lines was organised in 2008 at London's Somerset House and, since then, a lot of interesting and exciting developments have taken place in these two fields.

As inspiration, I'm posting here one of the first official videos (it's in Italian but the main interview with Chipperfield is in English) about the Venice Architecture Biennale opening next week, please check out the comments of this year's director, David Chipperfield about the main theme of this year's Biennale, "Common Ground" (around 2:29) and the search for something people have in common and share among themselves (guess there are plenty of things we could share between different disciplines such as architecture, fashion and design...).