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A Skin-Deep Analysis on Deconstruction: How Transforming the Modern Surface Transformed Notions on Gender Elise K

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A Skin-Deep Analysis on Deconstruction: How Transforming the Modern Surface Transformed Notions on Gender Elise K Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Scripps Senior Theses Scripps Student Scholarship 2016 A Skin-Deep Analysis on Deconstruction: How Transforming the Modern Surface Transformed Notions on Gender Elise K. Young Scripps College Recommended Citation Young, Elise K., "A Skin-Deep Analysis on Deconstruction: How Transforming the Modern Surface Transformed Notions on Gender" (2016). Scripps Senior Theses. 850. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/850 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Scripps Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scripps Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Skin-Deep Analysis on Deconstruction: How Transforming the Modern Surface Transformed Notions on Gender by Elise Young Submitted to Scripps College in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Humanities: Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture Professor Andrew Aisenberg Professor Marc Katz Professor Susan Rankaitis April 22, 2016 2 While focusing on high fashion and architecture, this thesis explores an aesthetic transition between the early 20th century’s “modern” style and the later 20th century style of “deconstruction.” We believe the style of “deconstruction” revolutionized visual metaphors for modern gender identity through the manipulation and experimentation of surfaces. These metaphors were accomplished through transformation relationships between surface, structure, and ornament. This study exclusively uses examples from women’s fashion and building façades for its analysis. Key words: gender, deconstruction, fashion, architecture, Rei Kawakubo, Frank Gehry. Acknowledgments Thank you to all the professors in the Scripps Humanities department for inspiring me to pursue critical analysis through an interdisciplinary approach. I thank Professor Andrew Aisenberg for fueling my thoughts in gender with discussion, and for agreeing to oversee my thesis while on sabbatical. I thank Marc Katz for encouraging my interests in visual designs, while reminding me to exercise precision in my analyses. Thank you to my biggest supporters, Nana Sadamura, Michelle Lord, and Samuel Dunham, for not only helping me shape this topic since the beginning of the year, but for helping me to work through some of the darkest periods in my life. As for my dear parents, thank you for instilling in me the belief that one should use her education as a means to spiritual fulfillment. I remember one of the few topics you were afraid of me learning about in college was that of Deconstruction tradition. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ..........................................................................................................................4 1.1. Previous Overlap Between Architecture and Fashion ..................................................4 1.2. The Gendering of Architecture and Fashion .................................................................6 1.3. Characterizing the Modern Surface ..............................................................................9 1.4. How the Style of Deconstruction Responded .............................................................14 2. Fashion’s Female Identity Through Deconstruction .........................................................18 2.1.Silhouettes and Spaces .................................................................................................20 2.2.Movement and Multiplicity .........................................................................................27 3. Male Identity through Deconstructivist Architecture .......................................................33 3.1.Practices of Truth vs. Practices of Narrative ...............................................................33 3.2.Gehry’s Photographs and the Spaces In-Between .......................................................39 4. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................41 5. Works Cited .......................................................................................................................43 4 INTRODUCTION Previous Overlapping of Architecture and Fashion Architecture and fashion design have similar origins, similar purposes, and areas of overlap in their creative processes. Both fashion and architecture originate from the need to shelter the human body from one’s environment; “the connection between clothing and shelter dates back as far as the Ice Age, when humans used animals’ skins to cover themselves” as well as clad “exteriors walls for crude structures.”1 Since then, the two design practices have expanded into means of aesthetic experimentation and expression of “identity – whether personal, political, religious, or cultural.”2 On top of sharing relatable origins and purposes in society, the sequence of their creative processes can be strikingly similar as well; the designer for either begins with a flat two-dimensional medium, transforming it to create complex three-dimensional forms. This is can be demonstrated by the phenomenon of designers adopting certain vocabulary and tectonic strategies. For example, “vocabulary derived from architecture has been applied to garments: i.e. architectonic, constructed, and sculptural. Similarly, architects have borrowed sartorial strategies and vocabulary from the fashion world such as draping, wrapping, weaving, folding, printing, and pleating surfaces and materials.”3 Both practices produce art forms meant to directly interact with their audience, i.e. buyers and inhabitants, as well as serve utilitarian purposes. Because of their interactive nature, “both garments and building are invaluable anthropological artifacts that mark 1 Brooke Hodge, "Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices In Fashion + Architecture," Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006) 11-21, here, 12. 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Ibid., 11. 5 important cultural and economic conditions, stylistic preferences, and new developments in technology and materials, when viewed as a part of a historical continuum.”4 The choice of materials, and what forms they are used to construct, reveal aesthetic preferences at the time, and even economic climate. The choice of ornamentation on a building identities and communicates the type of space the building encloses for its inhabitants. Ornaments and accessories that are worn communicate how the wearer wants to be identified; pious, devoted, risk-taking, athletic, rich, or modest. There are number of occurrences through history in which we can detect, “the same prevailing aesthetic tendencies, ideological and theoretical foundations, and technological innovations have influenced each, resulting in garments and buildings that share stylistic or structural qualities or derive from common creative impulses.”5 When viewed as a part of a “historical continuum, both garments and building are invaluable anthropological artifacts that mark important cultural and economic conditions, stylistic preferences, and new developments in technology and materials.”6 In fact, one could even argue that fashion has a long history of dealing with the “kinds of complex forms and constructions that architects are now able to construct thanks to advancements in software and building materials.”7 The fluted columns and drapery folds in ancient Greek architecture provide us an example of an overlap in aesthetic preference. The flutes and the drapery echo “the cylindrical form of the chiton – the iconic woolen tunic made from a single length of fabric draped over the bodies of both men and women. Both classical Greek dress and architecture were conceived in harmony with the proportions of the human figure. In fact, different types 4 Ibid., 12. 5 Ibid., 11. 6 Ibid., 11. 7 Ibid., 12. 6 of chitons were named for the Doric and Ionic architectural orders.”8 Because the human body was viewed as the golden standard for harmony, proportion, and balance, architecture and clothing were designed with the intent either echo or emphasize the structure of the human figure. Similarly, we can look at the “Medieval propensity for extreme verticality…in both Gothic dress and architecture” through its use of “sharply pointed shoes, sleeves, and hennins [conical headdresses] relate directly to ogival arches and soaring spaces of Gothic structures such as the thirteenth-century cathedrals at Amiens, France, and Salisbury, England.”9 Another example occurs in the 1850s, when “prefabrication of building materials and advancements in steel construction resulted in light, open architectural spaces, as fewer structural elements were required to engineer buildings. The Crystal Palace, an open web of cast-iron girders covered with glass designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, had one of the most open and expansive building interiors of all time.”10 Meanwhile, “a similar approach to construction was applied to women's wear: as a practical solution for heavy layers of petticoats or crinolines, designers developed armatures of metal hoops to support the wide dome-shaped skirts of the 1850s.”11 The Gendering of Architecture and Fashion While academics and designers pointed out areas of overlap between fashion and architecture, why are the rhetoric and associations surrounding them different? Let us first consider their
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