Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture

The intersection of what we wear and where we live is explored in Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art's Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture exhibition, which starts on November 19 and runs through March 5, 2007. The featured designers include Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Tom Ford, Jean Paul Gaultier,Vivienne Westwood and Azzedine Alaia, among others. The architects include Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Eisenman Architects.  There is also a catalogue accompanying the exhibit if you can't make it to LA.

Both architecture and fashion are based on the human body and on ideas of space, volume, and movement. They share similar vocabularies - pinning, darting, folding, wrapping, draping. In an essay for the show's catalogue, Brooke Hodge, MOCA's Curator of Architecture and Design identifies some commonalties between the two media. "A vocabulary derived from architecture has been applied to garments, describing them as 'architectonic,' 'constructed,' 'sculptural,'" she writes. Architects, on the other hand, have borrowed some "sartorial strategies," such as "draping, wrapping, weaving, folding, printing and pleating architectural surfaces and materials."