Voguepedia: Meet Hussein Chalayan!
Hussein Chalayan is known as fashion’s big thinker. From his endlessly whirring mind come future-gazing garments that transcend the runway and live outside trend. Voguedeclared his spring 2007 show, in which metal animatronic dresses rapidly morphed through more than a century of silhouettes, a moment of pure magic. And magic is what we’ve come to expect from this technology-obsessed conjurer whose designs continually challenge any received notions of what fashion can be.
“Fashion’s arch avant-gardist,”as Vogue has described him, was seen as something of a mad professor during his student days at Central Saint Martins design college in London. His graduate collection of rusted, romantically decomposed clothing—which had been buried in a friend’s backyard and exhumed six weeks later—put him on the map, though, and the cerebral, bordering-on-bizarre productions that followed placed him in the company of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano in the eyes of critics; the prodigiously talented trio was credited with raising the bar for English design in the nineties.
Chalayan crosses disciplines to explore the latest innovations in science, design, music, and multimedia arts. In a series of subtle mechanical movements, a molded white resin dress from spring 2000 revealed the moving parts of an airplane (allowing the wearer to metaphorically fly away). A spring 2008 shift was rigged with Swarovski crystals and 200 lasers to emit a brilliant red light. And for fall 2011, a robot dress shot out spring-loaded crystals, which were meant to suggest pollen.
Many of these creations are the subject of short films—including one featuring the Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton—that have been shown alongside his garments at the Design Museum in London, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. The accompanying music—whether it’s a live orchestra, a choral arrangement, or a soundtrack recorded with Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons—is emotional, transporting. “The only new work you can do in fashion is via technology,” Chalayan once said. “It lets you create something you couldn’t have done in the past.”
Transformation is one of Chalayan’s favorite subjects. An expert tailor and pattern-cutter, he has shown Tyvek garments that could be folded and sent in the mail. He’s had runway models walk off stage literally wearing the living-room furniture (the collapsible wooden coffee-table skirt from that fall 2000 collection is one of his best-known pieces).
Beyond the technological dazzle, Chalayan’s work inevitably carries an undercurrent of philosophical or social commentary. A Cypriot of Turkish extraction, he split his early years between the troubled island nation and the metropolis of London, and themes of isolation, migration, travel, history, politics and culture are integral to his vision. “The more isolated you are from the rest of the world, the more curious you are, the more you want to discover,”he told London’s Design Museum in 2009.
By Vogue.com
2 weeks ago
cigarettesandstarbucks asked: hey slutbag, how was Nora's?:)
i got mother pissed (: and it was good, i’ve got 3 pages of textiles work done today with a hangover! :o proud…
