As a follow up to the recent vintage-themed posts about patterns and geometries let's focus for today on a small collection created by architect and designer Bernard Rudofsky in the early '50s.
His research on clothes started in the '40s when, invited with his wife Berta to Black Mountain College, he lectured on the state of fashion and on what he called "anachronistic, irrational, impractical and harmful" clothes, while Berta held a workshop on sandal-making. In 1947, three years after Rudofsky curated the exhibition "Are Clothes Modern?" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the couple launched the successful Bernardo Sandals, a line of practical and functional footwear.
Rudofsky considered shoes as instruments of torture, but also criticised form-fitting clothes cut in individual sizes as he found them unattractive and uncomfortable. In the early '50s he launched therefore a compact collection of architectural pieces - the Bernardo Separates - based on one shape, the rectangle. The collection featured a tube dress, a square skirt, a sleeveless coat, a one piece bolero plus oblong drawstring shorts.
The garments were based on simple rectangles of cloth (their configuration calls to mind the project for a villa in Positano that Rudofsky designed with Luigi Cosenza in the '30s View this photo) and their only shape came from drawstrings or belts. Any separate would fit any size and the cost of each piece depended exclusively on the material as sewing was very basic (the prices in 1951 for items from this collection ranged from $5 for the shorts to $9 for the coat and the tube dress).
The clothes also saved space as they could be folded and stored on shelves instead of being hung and they could be shared, borrowed and loaned as they would fit anybody.
In the history of fashion further architectural and practical solutions along the same lines were presented decades later by Archizoom Associates with their "Dressing Is Easy" system (1972) and by Nanni Strada with her "Cloak" and "Skin" (1973) projects.
Comments