In yesterday's post we looked at an artist using fabrics to create paintings. But would it be possible for a fashion designer, instead, to turn things around and create a garment that, unfolded, would look like a painting?
If you have watched the documentary "Halston" (2019) by Frédéric Tcheng (and if you haven't, make a note in your diary to watch it as soon as possible, since it is probably the most complete one about this iconic American designer), you'll also know that the answer is yes.
At a certain point in the documentary it is stated that Halston took Charles James' concepts and relaxed them, creating modern clothes that went well with the changing role of women in society.
The documentary features a lot of interviews and the director also gets feedback from some of Halston's most famous models, among them Alva Chinn, Karen Bjornson and Pat Cleveland, who talk about the way the clothes were designed and made.
Chinn states the clothes allowed the wearer to combine elegance and ease and helped you feeling like you owned power without looking masculine.
Bjornson says that you felt incredibly free inside Halston's designs and Cleveland adds that Halston took away the cage and the constricting elements of clothes. But how did he do it?
Model Chris Royer sheds more light on this, explaining that fabric was for Halston like clay to a sculptor, he knew how to use it and everything was cut on the bias (cutting fabric on an oblique or 45-degree angle), so it spiralled on the body.
Halston would throw a piece of fabric on the floor, cut it, put it on a model - and voilà - it looked like an elegant, yet practical dress.
The director of the documentary also interviews Fred Dennis, curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, who is particularly fascinated by single-seam patterns and by the fact that some Halston patterns look like artworks.
Dennis shows the director two designs: a white dress with a knot on the front and a recreation of its pattern hanging on a wall as if it were a painting, and a black dress made from one piece of fabric following a pattern that, Dennis states, looks like a Cuisinart blade.
The curator compares Halston's patterns to abstract art, highlighting how the designer reduced the main principles of fashion to its least common denominators. Yet, you could read behind this statement also an architectural intent: just after the interview with Dennis, there is an archival interview with Halston in which he states that, for him, less definitely becomes more, a principle that characterised the work of German architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
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