Inside a checkerboard
recess, five invisible mannequins inhabit the clashing patterns of Rei
Kawakubo’s dresses and trouser-suits like so many poltergeists. Alongside, a
visitor’s skirt mixes Op Art white noise with strips of swampy camouflage.
But with her tottering heels and human imperfections she doesn’t look like
she belongs in the Kawakubo capsule, however closely her high street
knock-off echoes a Kawakubo Comme des Garçons ensemble. This is a space from
which the bodies have disappeared and the clothes have become autonomous
objects, a set of snakeskins which, shrugged off by their unpredictable
owners, have decided to go it alone.
As the woman wandered out of the galleries housing Radical Fashion, the
Victoria and Albert’s recent showcase of cutting-edge couture, I got to
thinking about the cup of coffee she might spill down her skirt in the
cafeteria, the wrinkles it would pick up as she squeezed into a crowded tube
carriage. In the checkered niche, the Comme des Garçons garments floated
serenely, safe in the knowledge that their washing instructions would go
unread now that they had come out of the closet as something like art.
`
Roland Barthes wrote that ‘the empty garment, without head and without
limbs, is death’. He had a point. Divorced from the body, clothes loose much
of their meaning. They can’t be paraded through nightclubs or street
markets, they lack the attitude and poise of a particular wearer, there’s no
danger of lipstick on a well-cut collar. Fashion feels animated in the
boutique dressing room, on the pages of style magazines and stalking down
the catwalk, but it encounters difficulties in the museum space. The
mannequin arrests fashion’s dynamism, making the gallery seem uncomfortably
close to a transplanted department store.
A year after the event, the New York Guggenheim’s Armani retrospective feels
like a perverse inversion of the Barneys experience, in which you paid to
enter the store but couldn’t buy the merchandise. The curators of Radical
Fashion clearly learned a lesson from the Guggenheim’s pilloried promo for
the Armani brand. The V&A’s exhibition featured the work of conceptual
designers displayed in installations of their own making, offset by the
sound environments of Paul Schütze, Björk and David Toop. If these
strategies for showing appear suspiciously similar to certain tendencies in
contemporary art, well, that’s the point. At a time when Jenny Holzer’s LED
poetry blips across the walls of Helmut Lang’s flagship parfumerie, and Hugo
Boss’ New York boutique gleams with a candy-coloured Jeff Koons mural,
Radical Fashion’s gambit makes a certain kind of sense.
At the start of the show were Junya Watanabe’s blooming lanterns of
polyester chintz suspended in a dark alcove. A modulating light seeped
through these white dresses, turning them from the dirty ivory of antique
lace into gleaming, futuristic zinc and back again. The display brought a
sense of history to the garments, like a wedding dress yellowing over time.
It was an elegant response to Watanabe’s once-and-future aesthetic, with the
dimming light standing in for the wearer.
Less successful was the Hussein Chalayan installation. One of Britain’s most
cerebral and visually stunning designers, his signature meditations on the
body were supplanted by a vast video screen. Computer generated models
floated through Tron-like environments, surrounded by hatched lines of
dress-cutter’s pencil. Occasionally they’d blow each other a kiss and the
recipient would disintegrate into a pile of fractured polygons, leaving a
tiny seed to be gobbled up by the aggressor. It might have said something
about the dreamy moral indifference and bland topography of the virtual
world, but nothing too interesting. Stuck unloved in a corner opposite the
big dumb screen, a Chalayan frock cast out of brittle sugar failed to
communicate the complex ideas of externalised energy and material arrest
that wowed on its first showing.
Helmut Lang’s foxy minimalism also suffered from its translation onto the
screen. There’s a certain élan in exhibiting not a single stitch of clothing
in a space devoted to the designer’s work, but looped surveillance-camera
footage of a recent runway show was a poor substitute for the sublimated
decadence of his pared down clothes. What was Lang saying? Something about
individualism under the panoptic eye? Something about fashion as an economy
of images? Maybe, but it was hard to tell through the smudgy red filter on
the camera lens. As with the installations of Martin Margiela and Issey
Miyake, Lang created something that looked a bit like art, but wasn’t.
Clothes presented as art objects suffer a Barthesian death, stripped of (or
off) the animating body. Like Chanel No. 5, garments are only really
activated when they grace the pulse points. Far from validating couture as a
fine art, many of Radical Fashion’s peculiar ‘installations’ sought to
replace complex, conceptual garments with see-through attempts at
appropriating contemporary art’s cultural currency: radical fashion hidden
beneath the emperor’s new clothes.
It was left to Alexander McQueen to show the way forward. Recreating à la
Duchamp’s valises a miniature version of a previous work, McQueen erected an
odd glass structure, half bus shelter, half padded cell. Viewers peered
through the glass, past two mannequins swathed in a confection of ruby
shards and chinoiserie, at a film of McQueen’s Voss collection
(Spring/Summer 2001). Held in an East End bus station, the collection’s
avian imagery and trembling psychosis referenced Max Ernst and Rebecca Horn.
Dark, camp and theatrical, the film elucidated the wonderful clothes draped
on the dummies trapped in the glass box, giving a visceral sense of how they
were to be inhabited. This wasn’t about fashion as contemporary art,
although McQueen wears his influences on his sleeve. This was fashion as
tooth-and-claw spectacle, brought to life by the snarling, essential force
of the body.
Radical Fashion was at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London, 18 October 2001 – 6 January 2002.
www.vam.ac.uk
Tom Morton is the Fashion Editor for contemporay