DESTE FASHION DILLER SCOFIDIO +RENFRO CONTENTS
FALSE STARTS Uniformity 06 Camouflage 12 Knock-Off 18 Thermal Comfort 26 Pulp Fashion 32
REAL STARTS Jeaneology 44 The Classic 60 FALSE STARTS
The many colours of Angela Merkel by Noortje van Eekelen/Spectacle of the Tragedy
5 Conference at Yalta, 1945
UNIFORMITY THE POLITICS OF THE SUIT
Uniforms are worn by members of an organization while participating in that organization’s activity. While typically the dress of military, paramilitary, service labor, prisoners and school children, the uniform also suggests aesthetic or cultural alignment. It is often joked that black is the uniform of artists and intellectuals despite their desire for nonconformity.
7 Good Bad Political choice represented in tie color
Good Bad “Le Président Bling-Bling” “His style, the bad suits, the cheap Windbreaker, the shoddy The difference between the best and worst can be as simple as fit shoes, and the unstylish haircut... is a signal to the working class that he is still one of them.”
No longer the military attire of dictators or the flamboyant regalia of old-world monarchs, today’s political uniform is the “power suit.” World politics is the stage for the dynamics of individual and collective representation, where the political and the sartorial meet. Publicized by the intensely visual medium of the press, the politician is caught, in a double-bind: he must be relatable to his local constituents and must, also, be seamless with global standards in which the cut, the fabric and the fit are markers of success.
UNIFORMITY 9 2012 G20 summit
1.Francois Hollande 2. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono 3.Barack Obama
4. Hu Jintao 5. Felipe Calderon 6. Lee Myung-bak
The relatively strict dress code of the G20 states limits individual expression to subtle articulations of the universal suit, which is often lauded as distinctly un-glamorous and independent from the whimsy of fashion.
Project: A micro-analysis will be conducted of G20 world leaders’ suits, charting the range and character of their subtle and unique variations. 7. Stephen Harper 8. Jacob Zuma 9. Vladmir Putin
UNIFORMITY 11 CAMOUFLAGE THE LOOK OF DISAPPERANCE
In the theater of war, where the survival of a soldier depends on his ability to avoid detection, tactical clothing is a military device. As opposed to fashion, which distinguishes the contours of the individual body, military camouflage blurs the contour between body and environment.
13 Ghillie suit (top) French Flecktarn camouflage(top) Camouflage mesh(above) Hunting camouflage(above)
With such high stakes, camouflage is the product of increasingly sophisticated research. Designs of military camouflage reflect cultural and technical biases. Compare the pixilated fields of color of today’s US Marine “digital camo” (MARPAT) with the organic color waves of the classic Flecktarn pattern.
CAMOUFLAGE 15 Desert MARPAT ?
USMC Snow (edited CADPAT) UCP (Universal Camouflage Pattern) UCP reverse engineered environment
But camouflage design is still an inexact science. The recent scandal around the United States’ investment in a $5 billion program to design and implement a “universal” camouflage pattern was intended to function equally well in desert, jungle, and forest terrains. Unable to match with any particular environment, the camouflage has failed universally.
Project: Reverse engineer an environment in which “universal camouflage” Woodland MARPAT successfully disappears.
CAMOUFLAGE 17 KNOCK-OFF CREATIVE INTREPRETATIONS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
There is a fine line between creative interpretation and piracy in fashion. While many fashion designers fall victim to cheap knock-offs that encroach on their originality, copying is vital to the health of the industry.
19 Anna Sui Forever 21 Diane von Furstenberg Forever 21
Piracy helps fashion. By definition, fashion relies on trends, and trends rely on their dissemination to all levels of the retail market, by copying. Copying is a turbocharger for the fashion cycle. Trends go out of fashion faster and push fashion designers to generate new ideas faster. This dynamic has motivated fashion since the industrialization of textile production in 18thC England.
The knock-off may have creative value as well. In the information age, the growth of do-it-yourself, trans-disciplinary design culture has loosened taboos around intellectual property and accelerated the exchange of ideas. “Open-source” design culture demands that differences between the original and the copy are signs of improvement rather than impoverishment.
KNOCK-OFF 21 Fashion Designer
Costume Preparer
Tailor
Project:
An original fashion artifact is passed from a designer to another creative producer with the brief, “please copy this.” It is assumed Artist that the copy will bring with it a new signature on top of the last. The copy of the original is then passed on to the next creative producer to make “a copy of the copy,” and so one five times. The chain of copies sparks a design dialogue across disciplines and “Telephone game. “ Information is passed from one party to another. At the end of the line the evolves a bottom-up approach to fashion. information is has been creatively distorted.
KNOCK-OFF 23 Original Louis Vuitton handbag Copy of Original
Copy of Copy Copy of Copy of Copy
KNOCK-OFF 25 saturation
THERMAL COMFORT REPERSONALIZE YOUR BODY TEMPERATURE
Buildings are responsible for more than 40% of primary energy expenditure. Much of this is spent on artificially modulating atmospheric effects like temperature and humidity.
Thermal comfort, once a relative measure that varied across populations and climates, has become globally standardized. Regardless of environmental and cultural situations, office and institutional buildings keep their interiors at a hyper-controlled twenty-two degrees Celsius. With the introduction of Honeywell’s thermostat controls came the expectation of micro-calibrating domestic atmospheres as well, ultimately resulting in today’s unsustainable excesses.
27 Honeywell thermostat by Henry Dreyfuss An early design for a personal air conditioning unit c.1934
22oC
15oC 15oC
15oC 18oC 22oC
Building : Active Fashion : Passive Building : Passive Fashion : Active $$$$ $
THERMAL COMFORT 29 15oC
20oC
22oC
Heated jacket
Boris Bidjan Saberi
USB powered ventilation shirt
A personal comfort device allows climatic expression
But comfort does not have to be communal. With buildings relying on passive strategies for heating and cooling, individual comfort can be actively addressed at the level of the body. Blood vessels close to the skin at the neck and the wrists (coincidentally, locations typically adorned with jewelry) are opportune sites to strategically tweak body temperature without affecting the environment beyond the skin. Alexander Wang Coolware personal cooling system Project:
The thermal device could be the ultimate fashion accessory, which, like driving an electric car, would express an individual’s commitment to environmentalism. In addition, the devices would allow the luxury of individual control and customization, while dramatically reducing global energy consumption.
THERMAL COMFORT 31 PULP FASHION ARCHITECTURE IS TO BUILDING AS FASHION IS TO CLOTHING
Both architecture and fashion share the distinction of being cultural “excesses” that stem from functional roots: building and clothing, resepectively. These excesses contribute to our appreciation of the extra-functional.
Architecture and fashion, however, differ drastically in relation to time. The word “fashionable” in architecture is pejoratve, unworthy of lasting cultural import. Fashion and architecture oscillate on different rhythms. Buildings are on a 50-100 year cycle. This long life span is not merely a product of the high investment required to build. ‘To set in stone’ is to exert cultural authority.
33 For 30,000 euros : 3 tons of zeroed out clothing For 30,000 euros : Oscar de la Renta 2013 Pre-Fall
Fashion, by contrast, is driven by the manic repetition of the industrialized world. Fashion exists if x > y, where ‘x’ is the lifespan Sometimes, this means shipment overseas to martkets where of a given garment and ‘y’ is the frequency of replacement of the out-of-date clothing is still viable for sale. But often it means same garment (Barthes). The lifespan of a trend is a season, not that clothing is shredded for rags or reduced to pulp for other a century. Every several months, clothing goes from the runway industries. For the thirty thousand Euros for a couture gown to the exclusive boutique, to the department store, to the sale from Paris, one could purchase many tons of recyclable pulp that rack. There is a point at which fashion value drains completely could be reconstituted into new material. from a given article. With its original cultural purpose nullified, the article must be either repurposed or destroyed.
PULP FASHION 35 Trans-America Trading Co textile breakdown
Approximately 12 million tons of textile waste is generated each year in North America Recycled denim jeans can be sourced as cheaply as $0.25 per pound (for denim rag, jeans with holes).
Project:
Neither forcing fashion to cool down nor architecture to heat up, the project brings the distinct assets of each discipline into a synthetic weave. Fashion can deliberately plan its own cycles of waste, anticipating and designing its afterlife in an architectural system that mirrors it. Feeding on fashion’s speedy metabolism, the permanence of architecture could give way to a building- clothing hybrids - seasonal structures produced quickly to be deployed to public sites and potentially converted into permanent building materials.
Five articles will be singled out for their idiosyncrasies and rescued for the collection from zeroed out stock.
PULP FASHION 37 CLOTH-CRETEClothcrete CLOTH MASONRY UNITS (CMU)
Clothing Shred to lint Lint Mix with cement
Mix with cement, spray on mesh Shotcrete Cast Cloth masonry unit
Fabric mulched and mixed with cement to work as shotcrete. Clothing is mulched , mixed with cement and cast into bricks
PULP FASHION 39 SKIRT BEAMS FIBERGLASS
Clothing Stitch skirts together, place in expand mesh Clothing Shred to strips
Filled with expandable foam Use as beam Drape on form, apply resin Fiberglass
Bundled clothing columns sinched and filled with foam. Clothing cut into strips and applyed with resin like fiberglass.
PULP FASHION 41 REAL STARTS
43 Woman Begging with Two Children c. 17th century, jeans clothed the working classes of Genoa
JEANEOLOGY DIFFERENCE IN DENIM
Blue jeans are as globally ubiquitous as McDonalds. While denim has a 350-year history, it was not until the 20th Century that denim trousers had become popular with coal miners, construction workers, and other members of the working class. In the 1950s James Dean elevated jeans to icon status, epitomizing a distinctly American form of youthful rebelliousness and freedom of expression.
Today, jeans are a 50 billion dollar industry worldwide worn equally by artists, laborers, and conservative politicians. Fashion designers from Martin Margiela to Uittenbogaard and Martens, to Dior, to Yves Saint Laurent have made their mark on this wardrobe staple, familiar to every closet. Each year, technological innovations in fabrics and changes in cuts add to the ever-growing jean inventory of fashion history.
45 Levi Strauss Jeans ad, 1886 Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans ad c.
Denim was very popular due to its durability (California c.1901) James Dean Lee Jeans ad
JEANEOLOGY 47 Tight baggies G+N Fashion Fugitive’s stitchless gluejeans Levi’s ipod jeans Heren’s Beauty and the Geek jeans
Jeggings Dior Radioactive jeans Marithé + François Girbaud wattwash jeans Storey and Ryan’s catalytic jeans
Recent additions include: the tight baggies; jeggings; G+N Fashion Fugitive’s gluejeans that replace traditional stitching at the seams with colorful glues; Dior’s Radioactive metallic jeans; Levi Strauss’s iPod-compatible jeans; Heren’s Beauty and the Geek jeans that come with a fully functional keyboard, mouse and speakers; Marithé + François Girbaud’s environmentally friendly laser and ozone treated jeans; Storey and Ryan’s catalytic jeans that are coated with titanium dioxide to neutralize airborne pollutants, and eco-chic jeans made of sugarcane.
JEANEOLOGY 49 Techinique 1: Inflated Airbeams are commonly used by the military
Techinique 2: Foam filled Spray foam insulation
Project: Blue jeans, as renewable as they are here to stay, will be recycled into a portable, nomadic architecture. The typical user-groups of nomadic architecture are protesters, gypsies, hippies, refugees, retirees, circus acts, and out-of-doors parties. Sponsored by a philanthropic consortium of high fashion houses, ‘zeroed-out’ jeans will be recycled into JMUs (jean modular units). Like a CMU (concrete modular unit), JMUs will be assembled into a Fashion Week tent, and then recycled to form a refugee camp. The JMUs are waterproofed, stitched together, and inflated with low-pressure air. Alternately, they can be filled with spray foam into light solids and detailed to stack and lock into a compression structure.
Five notable jean innovations will be curated for the collection.
JEANEOLOGY 51 Unit assembly Inflate Denim barrel vault
JEANEOLOGY 53 Detail of the intersection of two airbeams
Vinyl infill panel, typ.
Detail of supply tube and ballast below floor Axonometric showing airbeam integration
JEANEOLOGY 55
Case Study House 22 by Pierre Koenig photo by Julius Shulman
THE CLASSIC NOSTALIGIC FUTURES
Architecture aspires to timelessness. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Modernist glass house, where habitation is reduced to only a floor and a ceiling, enveloped by a glass skin. This minimalist expression is at once a product of advanced technologies and a symbol of an ineffable ideal: the perfect balance between man and nature.
61 Grandville illustration c. 1844
The domestic photography of Julius Shulman perfectly captured the spaces of midcentury Modernism. The photographs introduced to modern architecture the notion of lifestyle: dashing men preparing martinis; shapely women sunbathing on sun-drenched pool decks. Today however, Shulman’s photos demonstrate a strange discrepancy. The sixty-year old architecture has endured, but the then fashion-forward inhabitants appear dated by their dress. Their clothing is today’s only poignant reminder of the building’s true age. The vintage photos once posed to capture a timeless elegance actually reveal, inadvertently, discrete moments in fashion history.
The search for the “classic” in fashion still motivates designers. Few pieces seem to endure their momentary shelf life. But fashion also has cyclical logics. Every year, new looks reveal new biases. They then go dormant, only to reappear in retro styles — like a wheel in perpetual motion (Grandville illustration c. 1844). Case Study House 22 by Pierre Koenig photo by Julius Shulman
THE CLASSIC 63 Glass house c.1949 Andy Warhol at the Glass house c.1970
Glass house c.1967 Glass house c.2000
Philip Johnson’s Glass House remains a classic of 20th century Modernism and is as fresh today as when it first appeared. It persists as a cultural icon, and has served as stylish backdrop for a succession of trendsetters and cultural elites throughout Yet, there is an unexpected synchrony between architecture and its sixty-year history (Johnson, as an influential MOMA board fashion: the succession of styles are all equally at home within member, used the house as a salon). Each period of fashion the Glass House. Today’s inhabitant of the Glass House could is clearly discernible in the photodocumentation of the house. just as likely be seen in a Dior 1947 bar suit as a Raf Simons These photos curate a history of the last half-century of fashion for Dior Couture 2012. Fashion’s cycles continue to re-align alongside the house’s unchanging character, such as Johnson’s with the Glass House and the house adapts perfectly to past, full collar and chinos of the 50’s and Warhol’s signature ironic present and future. preppy chic of the 60’s.
THE CLASSIC 65 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
THE CLASSIC 67 Dior “Bar Suit,” 1947 Dior “Bar Suit,” 2012
THE CLASSIC 69 Edie Sedgwick, late 1960s Marc Jacobs Fall 2013 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC 71 Project: A series of staged architectural photographs tells a fictional narrative. The setting is a cocktail party involving a couple and their 10 guests. The characters wear a range of contemporary fashions (5 are curated for the collection) that have a temporal ambiguity. The Glass House acts as a protagonist – its glass is a photogenic device to frame, reflect, refract, obscure, and expose the narrative. Time itself is stopped, reversed, and released forward.
POTENTIAL COLLECTIONS FOR THE CLASSIC A CATALOGUE OF 2012
111 Dior “Bar Suit,” 1947 Dior Fall 2012 Couture
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 113 Photo by John French 1950
Nottingham Fashion Show, 1951 Valentino Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 115 Balenciaga, L’Officiel Magazine, 1956
Miu Miu Fall 2011 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 117 Chanel Vogue 1956
Jason Wu Spring 2012 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 119 Vogue 1958
Giorgio Armani Spring 2012 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 121 Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s,1961
Rochas Spring 2012 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 123 V de V 1966
Rochas Spring 2013 Ready-to-Wear
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 125 Unknown, by Henry Clarke, Photographer
Dior Spring 2013 Couture
THE CLASSIC : SELECTS 127
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