A

case

study.

hussein

chalayan

Designer.

was born in nicosia, cyprus in 1970. chalayan is an internationally regarded fashion designer who is renowned for his innovative use of materials, meticulous pattern cutting and progressive attitude to new technology. he was educated both in cyprus and england, at london's strict highgate boarding school. in 1993 he graduated from london's central st martins college of art and design. he caused a sensation with his graduate collection decomposed silk dresses he had buried and exhumed. since then he has produced more than 20 collections and twice been crowned british designer of the year (1999, 2000). chalayan is inspired by architectural theories, science and technology. he famously produced a collection which included chairs and tables that became garments. he has been involved in numerous international exhibitions, including radical fashion at the V&A victoria & albert museum in london (1997), fashion at the kyoto costume institute in japan (1999), airmail clothing at the muse de la mode palais du louvre in paris (1999), the istanbul biennial (2001) and 'godess: the classical mode' at the museum of modern art in new york (2003). chalayan has also designed costumes for opera and dance performances. hussein chalayan represented turkey at the 51st art biennale in venice (2005). he was awarded the M.B.E. (member of the order of the british empire) in the 2006 queen's birthday honours list for his services to the fashion Industry.

detail of inflatable paris fashion show fall/winter 2006 wear fall/winter

collar,

ready

to

wear collection, detail of shoes, ready to collection, london fashion show 2006

chalayan

created

chandelier

for

the

swarovski

crystal

palace

installation. it is an airplane wing, balancing against when its large wing flap moves, a long strip of crystals are illuminated by LEDs (2006).

a wall. swarovski

airplane dress, spring/summer it is made from the same material and changes shape by remote control.
THE ART OF 19 September 2009 10 January 2010 FASHION:

used

collection in aircraft

2000. construction

INSTALLING

ALLUSIONS

The Art of Fashion is the current autumn exhibition at The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen which investigates the borders between fashion and art. It explores todays fashion designers who work more and more often with installations, performances and sculptural designs and in their turn influence the art world. The Art of Fashion reveals the sparks that fly at the interface between fashion and art. Hussein Chalayan was one of five designers commissioned to make a new work specifically for the exhibition. The resulting tank installation is entitled MICRO GEOGRAPHY: A CROSS SECTION. The Art of Fashion has been compiled by guest curators Jos Teunissen (lecturer at ArtEZ Arnhem) and Judith Clark (exhibition maker, London). The exhibition was made possible by the H+F Fashion on the Edge programme of author and art collector Han Nefkens, and by the Mondriaan Foundation, SNS Reaal Fonds and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. Among those fashion designers considered intellectual or avant garde, Hussein Chalayan has the distinction of having been dubbed both a genius and the mad professor of British fashion. A thoughtful

designer of collections with purity of vision, integrity, and wearability, he is often counted in company with designers like Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela. Chalayan's collections consistently challenge familiar notions of fashion while still succeeding in being elegant and beautiful. His work is inspired by the interfaces of technology, science, culture, and the human body. His more conceptual designs are often sculptural, with pieces like the aeroplane dress, molded of glass fiber with a remote-control panel, a tiered wooden skirt doubling as a table, and dresses of sugar-spun glass making their appearances in various shows. While in school, one of his professors suggested he switch to sculpture. If he had, the fashion world would have lost a unique voice whose work blurs the line between art and style with evocative and sometimes brilliant results. Shortly after graduating, Chalayan started his own line, also doing collections for TSE of New York, Autograph at Marks & Spencer in London, and a line for Topshop of London. Although his clothes are available at high-end venues like Browns, Harvey Nichols, Harrods, and Liberty, he has worked in crossmedia, designing an installation for London's Millennium Dome, doing collaborations with a variety of other artists and designers, and having his more sculptural designs exhibited in art galleries. He is reticent of the fashion scene and is not given to courting celebrity power. A designer of ideas, Chalayan is also a designer of clothes to be worn. Though some critics judge his work as too eccentric and heady for actual people to wear, an examination of any given Chalayan collection belies this sentiment. Although several high-concept pieces will usually anchor one of his collections, they are accompanied by finely cut, deceptively simple, eminently wearable garments. This kind of commerciality with pure vision at its heart is not a common commodity in any field of design, including fashion; consequently, Chalayan's praises have been much sung by the press, his work well respected by other designers. As one fashion journalist put it, "Watching a Chalayan show is like listening to Mozart. It is moving and magical, always with a hidden meaning, which to detractors sound pretentious." A theme common to all of Chalayan's collections is the body itself, in relation to various aspects of the world we live in from space, religion, and cultural mores to technology and war. His fall 2000 collection, which included the table skirt, was inspired by the designer's thinking on the wartime impermanence that finds homes raided and families forced to flee or be killed. At the end of the show, the living room set on the catwalk stage was turned into dresses and suitcases, and off the models went, with their homes on their backs. Also included in this collection were finely tailored coats with unexpected draping, highlighted in white piping, creating a sense of volume, depth, and luxury, as

well as elegant dresses in lush colors, and full, layered skirts and tops, exposing a hidden layer of ruffles at cutouts in the hemall extremely wearable garments. In another collection, underlining the constraints imposed on women by the Muslim religion, Chalayan created chadors of varying lengths and sent the models out wearing nothing beneath them, drawing attention, inescapably, to the fact that beneath the delimitations of the garment there are living, breathing women. Indeed, Chalayan's models almost always wear low-or flat-heeled shoes, and there is a decided emphasis on grace and dignity over the overt sexuality of high-heeled couture in his designs. A unique and elegant futurism achieved through complex cutting and a clean architecturalism are the hallmarks of Chalayan's collections. One spring collection offered splashes of sweet color in crisp, off-the shoulder dresses and deceptively simple frocks with multiple gathers. Another delivered these features in starker shades with smock dresses of fine pleats, pieces made up of pleats within pleats, mesh overlays, and sharply tailored jackets. Other innovations and contributions that Chalayan's idea-driven design have produced include unrippable paper clothes, suits with illuminated flight-path patterns, long knitted dresses with built-in walking sticks, pleated "concertina" dresses, cone and cube headdresses, designs based on experiments, flight paths, abstractions of meteorological charts, and a host of exquisite, minimal, subtly draped works.

Hussein Chalayan, winter 2000 collection: skirt which transformed from a table.
At the end of 2000, due to some mishaps with manufacturers and despite rising profits, Chalayan took his company into voluntary liquidation. The collection he designed in the interim between liquidation and the relaunch of his new label were described as "hugely desirable" and "timeless." The collection came from Chalayan's meditations on journeys and maps. Shirttails emerge briefly from under a skirt's

hips, a white cotton shirt turns into a dress, meteor-streaked inserts distinguish tailored coatsall part of the designer's idea that "there's a progression that carries over from one piece to another." Taking the conceptualization further, into the consideration of personal journeys of identity, Chalayan addresses the subject of cultural assimilation with clothes like wool jackets inset with fragment of denim and leather

PARIS, October 3, 2010 The concentration of thought in a Hussein Chalayan collection is such that it compels fixation on details. In today's presentation, for instance, the black patent insert on a crepe satin dress was intended to duplicate the sheen of lacquer in the dark. It was one facet of a collection that Chalayan called "an abstract take on Japan." Nothing literal, thank you, but more notions, such as the Japanese fetishization of packaging reenvisioned by the designer as diagonals of broderie anglaise wrapping the body like a gift. All this was showcased in a film he directed. ("Much more work than a show," Chalayan said.) It was called Sakoku, a reference to Japan's deliberate policy of cultural isolation, which prevailed until the mid-nineteenth century, but as arcane as that framework may sound, it scarcely compromised clothes that embodied the designer's now-signature blend of intellectual rigor and appeal to the senses. You could see that, for instance, in the cotton voile dresses that burst out from under tailored waistcoats, or the pieces in a poplin so white it was practically clinical and that shimmered with inserts of translucent mesh. Chalayan has an extraordinary legacy of his own work to draw on, so there were revisitings of old ideas. The distinctive curved shoulders were drawn from a 1998 collection. The colorblocking was also something he's done before, though its manifestation herein combinations like pink, olive green, and blackwas particularly striking. Chalayan's personal pick from the collection was a pink dress whose minimalism highlighted his technical proficiency (whereas a lot of details, he insisted, make it easier to hide mistakes). The fact that this dress was a sensuous complement to the female form was, of course, an added bonus. And it made one anticipate much more of the same from one of fashion's most radically underappreciated artists.