Radical Fashion

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This is a 2001 article from the Guardian website, regarding an exhibition at the V&A. The article itself is quite interesting so I thought I'd share.

I just hope this is the right place to post it....




Radical Fashion

Electric frocks


In 50 years' time, fashion historians will look back at the turn of this century as a golden age - as important as when Christian Dior launched the New Look. A ground-breaking autumn exhibition at the V&A, sponsored by The Observer, celebrates the rise of the radical - from British showman Alexander McQueen to Belgian recluse Martin Margiela. Here, Tamsin Blanchard introduces our exclusive preview
www.observer.co.uk/radicalfashion

Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer


As Björk twisted her hips on stage, the bright red ostrich feathers of her crinoline skirt moved independently of her, making her movements look odd and dislocated. And as her body shook, the shiny glass beads suspended from her bodice rang like tiny bells. In the extraordinary dress, she became a human tambourine. The singer, who is no stranger to the more remote, outlandish regions of planet fashion, is the only woman in the world to own the Alexander McQueen dress. It's one of his favourites, partly because it was so difficult to create. The glass beads are actually 2,000 microscope slides, ordered from a surgical supplier, and each one is hand drilled. Then they are individually painted red. 'It took about a month-and-a-half to make that dress,' he says. 'The construction under the feather skirt is something else. It's like an 18th-century crinoline. It was the only thing that would stand the shape. Everything is sewn by hand.' The significance of the glass is that it is about putting the body under a microscope. They are red because 'there's blood beneath every layer of skin.'


The only other dress in existence is being installed in a glass tank at the V&A, to be displayed as part of the museum's new show, Radical Fashion. For Alexander McQueen, provocation and fashion go hand in hand. 'It has to be radical to make people sit up and to change the way things are,' he tells me, while preparing for his show this weekend. The self-proclaimed 'bad egg' of British fashion has moved his own collection to Paris for the first time. 'Radical is about challenging what's accepted and what's not. Sometimes it's vulgar, but beauty comes out of that. Sometimes it will hark back to history, because everything has to have a basis. Most of the time, I try to provoke people. I've always said if someone leaves the show and vomits, or has a feeling of "what was that all about?" then I've done my job.' He goes as far as to say he is an anarchist against fashion. 'Yes, of course,' he shrugs. 'You should never settle for anything you're not happy with.'


In the 21st century, when most of us would be happy with jeans and a T-shirt seven days a week if we had the choice, dressing is all about making life easier. When was the last time you saw someone in the street whose clothes made you stop and stare? The punks did it in the 70s, and the new romantics in the 80s. Björk still likes to make a spectacle of herself. But much of that is about performance. Very few of us actually want to make life more difficult for ourselves by adding extra padding to our bodies, or walking around in a dress that would look more at home in topiary than on a woman's body. But the V&A has chosen this moment to celebrate the work of 11 designers who push clothing to the limits. The designers - Rei Kawakubo, Alexander McQueen, Junya Watanabe, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, Azzedine Alaia, Yohji Yamamoto, Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela, Jean Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake - have all made clothes that challenge the status quo.

Just a few of their more difficult and most dazzling moments come to mind, including Alexander McQueen's beautifully carved legs for the amputee athlete Aimee Mullins, who wore them to model for his 'Untitled' spring/summer 99 collection; Hussein Chalayan's table that was ingeniously engineered to transform itself into a skirt at the touch of a spring; Junya Watanabe's shirts that were cut to fit a mannequin with extremely stooped shoulders, resulting in seams that twisted around the model's body; and Martin Margiela's fashion show played out entirely by puppets in a dark Parisian space at close to midnight. During this week's Paris shows, there will be plenty more opportunities for these designers to stop their audiences in their tracks and show them something ingenious, astonishing or just plain puzzling. Without those moments, fashion would stagnate. Its energy would die.

Fashion editors see more bizarre, wild and fantastical sights than most. This select bunch, who travel the globe four times a year in the name of fashion, see some of the weirdest things. Occasionally, these sights make the pages of the daily newspapers, often with an accompanying headline that runs to the effect of 'Would you be seen dead in this?' or 'What planet are they on?' The more unlikely an outfit will ever be worn in real life, the more likely it is to make the papers. Some say such showstoppers are the sort of thing that gives fashion a bad name. They are self-indulgent. They belong on the West End stage, or in the wardrobe department of a sci-fi movie. They grab headlines but leave buyers cold. But for a small group of designers, making clothes that provoke or challenge is not about attention seeking.

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has tunnel vision when it comes to creating a new collection. She is one of the few designers capable of making a jaded, seen-it-all fashion pack leave her shows feeling totally bewildered - her 'Lumps' collection for spring/summer 97 was one of her most extreme - and most memorable The name says it all. One model walked out looking as though she had an eight-month pregnancy bump on her side. Another seemed to have some kind of giant tumour growing out of her back. Several of the models had long sausage shapes bandaged to their torsos. Shoulders were padded to an extent that the models' necks disappeared. The colours were bright and cheery enough, with jolly tablecloth ginghams thrown into the mix.

But in the silence, broken only by the mechanical whir of the photographers' shutters clicking and winding, it was all decidedly unsettling. The audience didn't know what to do with themselves. Some sniggered and smirked, trying to catch the eye of someone else to share the joke. Others looked incredulous. The odd few looked on intensely, hardly batting an eye. The unexpected is just what they expected from Rei Kawakubo, the queen of radical fashion. And this was the designer at her most extreme. 'Body becomes dress becomes body,' she proclaimed.

I rushed back to my hotel room that night to file my copy for the next day's paper. 'The lights went down,' I wrote, 'and with only the whirring of the camera motor drives for music, the first model walked out with a sheer black stretch top, a hump over her bottom and knitted pads shoved down the back of her top, to make her look like a cross between Elephant Man, Quasimodo and the eccentric night-clubber, performance artist and Lucian Freud model Leigh Bowery.' I concluded that although Kawakubo's work might have been art, it was difficult to understand who would buy this collection. Yet, five years later, it is a collection that really stands out in my mind, as vivid and jaw-droppingly odd as it was then.

For Kawakubo, radically altering our perceptions of clothes - or even the body itself - is a fundamental need. 'I try to make clothes that are new, that didn't exist before, and hope that people get energy and feel positive when they wear them,' she says. 'I believe that creativity is an essential part of life.' It is the only way she knows to design. Part of the process of creating two new collections each year is about pushing the boundaries, and pushing her own thought processes and vision. There are times - quite often - when editors leave her shows feeling bemused, slightly outraged, unsure of what to feel or think. 'Radical itself can mean either revolutionary, or essential and profound,' says Kawakubo. 'For me, it is all these things. Radical action means making big progress beyond myself.'

 

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Radical Fashion .../2

It is no coincidence that some of the most avant-garde designers have been head-hunted by the world's luxury fashion houses. Hussein Chalayan, who describes himself as 'an ideas person' has just been appointed creative director of fashion for that most traditional and conservatively English of jewellery companies, Asprey. Martin Margiela is the fashion industry's very own JD Salinger. The Belgian designer who has so avoided playing the fashion game that he has never been photographed, continues to show his idiosyncratic collections in the most unorthodox of ways, while holding down a more conventional position as creative director at the bourgeois French luxury goods house Hermès. The Austrian designer, Helmut Lang, is backed by Prada. And Alexander McQueen took up his position as chief designer at French couture house Givenchy, until he was offered a better deal by Gucci, which now bankrolls his own collections. Fashion's radicals have never been so powerful.

Hussein Chalayan, the Turkish-Cypriot who is based in London, says the word 'radical' has difficult connotations. 'The first thing it implies for me is "extreme" - something that is drastic,' he says. 'Applied to clothes, it can probably mean "experimental". Generally, I don't consider myself radical, but as someone who responds to things around me. I don't think the things I do are drastic. The table skirt was the peak of an idea. I didn't propose people actually put it on and walk around in it. If I did propose that, then it becomes drastic.' The table skirt and the entire set from the show Chalayan presented during London Fashion Week at Sadler's Wells Theatre ended up in Tate Modern's Century City exhibition earlier this year.

'Challenging is the best word for me,' he says. 'Initially, when I was doing experiments with the burying of clothes, it was a challenge for myself and I was pleased with the results.' This was his first collection that won him the windows of Browns in South Molton Street after he graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1993. He buried clothing with iron filings to see how it would decompose. It is an idea he has revisited for his 'Map reading' collection for this season. It is true that he sets himself various challenges when creating a collection. For his 'Before minus now' collection in spring/ summer 2000, he made a dress that was motorised, with flaps that lifted up like on the wings of a plane. It was a problem he set himself and showed to the fashion world as a thing of wonder.

As with all his collections, there is nothing difficult about the finished clothing that hangs on the rails at Liberty or Harvey Nichols. 'I definitely have strong opinions on stuff,' he agrees. 'I can be very opinionated, but I'm not fanatical about what I do. I don't believe in the idea that everything should be difficult. It is not always gain through pain. You evolve. I like to always think of something that makes me move on. I always try to progress in some way. Sometimes you have to make mistakes to move on. That's part of the process. There's too much pressure on creative people to get it right.'

Moving on, and not being afraid of making mistakes, is something that these designers have in common. It's all about progress. They are the engine that keeps the fashion world turning. OK, so you think the idea of wearing a dress made of razor-shells that cut your hands is ridiculous. But it's simply Alexander McQueen's way of making a statement, of airing an idea -'It was about nature, about life and death,' says McQueen. Conceptual art and fashion design have never been so close. What also connects the designers is their unwillingness to compromise. The exhibition's curator, Claire Wilcox, has given each designer total creative control over how their clothes will be displayed. It's as close as the general public will get to the actual experience of seeing the designer's vision by way of a fashion show.

'The exhibition is about difference,' she says. As the punter walks through a giant eye at the entrance to the exhibition, the idea is that they walk into the minds of each of the designers. 'They are the leaders,' says Wilcox. 'Has anyone seen anything like Watanabe before? You would think it would be impossible to create new clothes again, but these designers have.'

The amazing candy-coloured sculptural silhouettes of Comme des Garçons protégé Junya Watanabe are apparently suspended in mid-air. They appear to be weightless. The Chalayan installation includes a film he made for his collection for spring/summer 2001, based on an automaton who eventually takes a hammer and shatters her dress made out of a shell of sugar. It is a strangely violent moment, one perhaps influenced by the political turmoil of Chalayan's birthplace, Cyprus. 'I'm grateful for my bi-cultural background,' he says. 'I was exposed to more. You have more to respond to and you question things more.' His Turkish-Cypriot roots are never far from the surface, not in a literal 'ethnic' way, but as an unsettling undercurrent. 'The concept informs everything he makes,' says Wilcox. 'His wearable clothes are imbued with it. Every seam, every stitch is considered.'

Martin Margiela's installation is perhaps the most challenging. It was put in place by the elusive designer's right-hand man Patrick Scallon, and is a series of shipping crates, with holes cut out so that you can see the clothes inside. 'It's all about the day-to-day endeavours of a fashion house,' says Wilcox. 'We've had numerous conversations about how to capture Margiela's particular aesthetic.' The result has been to show the clothes in the crates they arrived in. The clothes themselves don't get unpacked. Instead, each crate is stamped with a percentage (the box containing an oversized jacket is stamped with the words "148% of its original size"), and has a spoken commentary to explain the contents within.

Questions to Margiela are greeted with a collective answer from the house rather than from the man. It is the way he has always worked, determined that the clothes are more important than the designer. Few people know what he looks like. In a world where the designer has become a cult figure - as much a celebrity as the Hollywood stars he or she dresses - Margiela's decision to keep total anonymity is perhaps the most radical step of all. 'It gives him freedom,' says Wilcox. It also focuses the viewer's attention on the clothes themselves.

You might think this is all a bit unnecessary. But image is everything with these designers, from their catwalk shows to their perfume packaging and advertising. Margiela has shown his collections in obscure venues such as a Salvation Army HQ, a disused metro station and a circus marquee. The catwalk extravaganzas of both McQueen and Chalayan are productions impressive enough to run for a season in the West End. The New York-based designer Helmut Lang, however, has used his shows in a subversive way, like the season he decided simply to put his collection on the internet. When he does show, there is not much of a song and dance. His particular selection of models, featuring women in their fifties as well as the usual 20-somethings, march around the audience at a pace so fast and furious you have to really concentrate not to miss one.

His low-tech, raw, urban shows are the antithesis of McQueen's productions. But they are equally as powerful. For his installation at the V&A, Lang has simply installed a video screen and a couple of benches in a space that is dark and minimal. The film lasts about three hours, and is a compilation of all the catwalk collections he has ever done. There are no clothes on display. For Wilcox, it is the perfect reflection of the designer's aesthetic. 'In Lang, there is not a superfluous stitch,' she says. 'But the more you look, the more fulfilled you are by wearing his clothes.'

Radical fashion is not about youth. Nor is it about the shock of the new. It is 13 years since Rei Kawakubo made her simple pronouncement: 'Red is black.' She has been designing for over 30 years; Martin Margiela for more 20. The French enfant terrible , Jean Paul Gaultier, is 49. Despite the fact that he has established his own successful couture house, he still doesn't act his age. He is as irreverent as ever. Azzedine Alaïa, the Paris-based Tunisian designer who refuses to show his collections at the same time as everybody else, and holds small salon presentations for his loyal customers, is 50. These are designers who ought to be well and truly entrenched into the Establishment. Instead, they have learnt from their experience and have the confidence to push their own barriers. They are restless spirits who will never be content, creatively at least. They exist within their own separate universes. And what is important is that they never run out of things to say.

All of these designers work outside the regular ups and downs and ever-decreasing circles of the fashion world. They don't follow trends; they make them. Their followers are not teenage fashion victims. Half of the time their messages are too cerebral for the fashion pack to understand, let alone the average fashion junkie or sensation-seeking celebrity. Issey Miyake's core customers tend to be artists, designers and architects; Yohji Yamamoto has been the subject of a film by Wim Wenders. Claire Wilcox herself, an academic and curator, is a fan of Helmut Lang. These are the clothes of the intelligentsia - still fashion victims, mind, but clever ones, with the confidence to carry off clothing still heavy with the thought process that created it.

It's a theme that Wilcox has explored in the exhibition with a film called Changeling , in which 72-year-old ex-model Daphne Self discusses what it feels like to wear various items of clothing, while 22-year-old model Rachel Creek does the same. 'It's about how beauty isn't just about youth,' says Wilcox. 'Rachel said they made her feel like a different person, while Daphne said she wanted to control the clothes.' Some of these clothes need the authority of years to give equal confidence to both the outfit and the wearer.

Truly radical fashion never dates. Issey Miyake has been experimenting since the 60s, but the clothes he made 30 years ago, using geometric shapes and specially treated synthetic fabrics, look timeless. Like all good progressives, however, Miyake has moved on. He is motivated by a desire to provide solutions to problems. Instead of making 'difficult' or 'challenging' clothes, he wants to create a way of dressing that is as easy as jeans and a T-shirt. After the success of his Pleats Please line, a relatively affordable collection of pleated synthetic clothing that rolls up for easy storage and concertinas out to work on all shapes and sizes, he focused his attention on an even more radical idea. Last year, Miyake stopped designing his main line and handed the job to his long-term assistant, Naoki Takizawa, so that he could concentrate 100 per cent on his brand new A-POC.

Not content just to reinvent cutting and fabric technology, Miyake has gone to the very root of the problem and revolutionised the manufacturing process itself. A-POC is short for 'a piece of cloth'; tubes of fabric are knitted on a huge roll following a specially designed computer programme. Each section of tube contains a mini wardrobe within it. All the consumer has to do is cut out each item, following a set of easy-to-follow instructions. It is fashion at its most industrial. 'Sometimes my clothes are radical,' he says, 'sometimes challenging, but I try not to fear radical things.' As Claire Wilcox writes in the introduction to Radical Fashion , the book that accompanies the show, Issey Miyake's work is 'radical in its democracy'. She calls him a 'happy radical', identifying him as someone who 'wants to solve clothing problems'. Radical fashion designers, whether they are happy, angry, or simply motivated by their own desire to create, will continue to upset the status quo. A designer like Alexander McQueen is not about to start making homogenised, mass-market clothes, just as Marks & Spencer is not about to start producing dresses that require industrial quantities of surgical slides and ostrich feathers. And thank heavens for that. But with the world entering social and economic turmoil, McQueen's creative juices are not going to be stopped mid-flow. He cites Dior's 'New Look' as a radical fashion moment, which only happened because it came out of war and recession. 'It's a scary time,' he says. 'But it will go down in history as a time of progression.' The seeds of change have been sewn.