Social media platforms associated with online images offer a variety of immediate aesthetically pleasing digital pictures, providing us with a rich visual grammar and vocabulary. When it comes to fashion, this vocabulary borrows from the semantic fields of excesses, offering to our eyes bright palettes, extreme silhouettes, outlandish shapes and over-embellished designs. In a nutshell, designs that immediately catch our attention, providing us with an instant visual kick.
Yet focusing on something less grand and more minimalist may offer us the chance to stop and ponder more about fashion also in connection with other disciplines, including art and architecture. The Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI) has currently got a compact display, for example, that helps visitors to do exactly this. Part of its "Selection" events, "Unclassifiable Items - From the Gift of Helmut Lang", curated by the institute's Rie Nii, features 21 pieces by the Austrian minimalist designer, who debuted in 1986 and worked in Paris and New York.
The founder of fashion minimalism, influenced by modernist architecture, German expressionism and Vienna, where he originally set up his business, Lang created pieces that had a strong connection with art and the exhibition invites visitors to see the designs on display as if they were viewing contemporary art.
The antithesis of the "look at me" ethos, Lang's designs were unadorned basic pieces with no frills, bows or ruffles. The power of visual forms wasn't indeed reached through over-decorative elements and embellishments, but through asymmetries and cut-out areas in unexpected places in both men and women's wear that pointed at eroticism and turned the skin of the wearer into a part of the design, exposing the basic structure of the garment.
The purity and sleekness of the designs guaranteed the wearer's body functionality, but their minimalism also allowed the wearer to erase boundaries and constrictions imposed by traditional clothes, disrupting conventions. Lang's skirts repurposed for example the shapes of slips and jackets normally worn on the upper body.
The exhibition at the KCI includes what the fashion institution considers as "unclassifiable items", among the others a cotton knit V-strap, a black stingray cropped top with Velcro opening, neck holsters, shoulder belts, harnesses and arm straps. Materials go from cotton to knitted synthetics and chemical fibers such as nylon and all-poly materials.
The designs, part of the 100 or so looks gifted by Lang to the KCI, are displayed at the institution without mannequins. As they assume a role and a function when they are worn on the body, subtracting the body from this fashionable equation reveals the simple beauty of the visual forms on display. In this way visitors are given the chance to analyse from close-up details that were not discernible on the runways.
It is actually difficult to definitively say whether something is a jacket or a vest, or what to call an item consisting of straps: some of these pieces seem indeed to simply hint at the outline of clothing, but they do not constitute clothes. A few items on display are more abstract and could be deemed contemporary art objects rather than merely clothes.
Lang created these designs following the methodology of abstraction and reconstruction of the external forms of clothes: these belts and straps are indeed components of a garment, cool accessories with a decorative purpose. They can be combined with familiar tailored items such as white shirts and pant suits and allow the wearer to create new ensembles, modern looks with an architecturally sophisticated twist about them.
At the same time, displayed on the walls, these light and weightless pieces reveal their links with architecture, they tell us that they could be considered like some of Le Corbusier's fundamental five principles (think about the pilotis or supports, the key elements that hold a structure together and elevate it; these pieces do the same for an ensemble, they support it and elevate it).
Among the thought-provoking designs on display, some verge towards the industrial brutalism, others provide comments on functions. Belts and shoulder straps and harnesses are inspired by utility wear, but also military garb: attached shoulder pads designed to be worn on top of another design as if they were military epaulets, are unadorned just like ordinary shoulder pads used underneath a top or a jacket. In this way, the designer explored the spatial connections focusing on the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body.
Talking about spatial connections, it is worth noting that the layout of this exhibition was inspired by the display of Lang's creations as a wall-mounted exhibit (2014–19) at the Mak Design Lab, a permanent exhibition at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK).
Recently visited also by photographer Juergen Teller, "Unclassified Items" is a compact and brief introduction to Lang's minimalist aesthetic defined here by abstractions, reductions and reconstructions in a modernist key.
Images in this post
All images in this post © The Kyoto Costume Institute, photos by Kazuo Fukunaga
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