Some garments are love at first sight. Others go completely unnoticed until we try them on and suddenly they make us feel incredible, as if they had been made exactly for our body. There are basic, quiet clothes that simply do their job, and others so strange that we do not know whether to admire them or wonder who decided they should exist at all. Some may look hideous and still possess something hypnotic; others are simply hideous. Clothing can be comfortable, absurd, elegant, uncomfortable, beautiful, vulgar or unforgettable. And then there are those pieces that move so far away from what we understand as dressing that it becomes difficult even to call them clothes.
They rise over the shoulders, widen the hips until anatomy disappears, harden the body beneath rigid structures or surround it with materials that seem to have come from architecture, a laboratory or some organism that has not yet been named. Some can be worn; others barely allow movement. Many end up behind glass, lit exactly like a sculpture.
Then a fairly simple question appears: at what point do we stop looking at a dress and start looking at a work?
The boundary seems obvious until we try to locate it.
A body does not have to keep its shape
For centuries, clothing has altered the body. Corsets, crinolines, shoulder pads, bustles and heels never merely covered it: they stretched, compressed, raised and rebuilt it according to the ideal of each period. The difference, then, may not lie in transforming the silhouette. Fashion has been doing that for a very long time.
Crinoline, 19th century. Metal and cotton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute. Public Domain / Open Access.
What becomes strange is when transformation stops trying to beautify a recognisable body and begins to invent another one.
Rei Kawakubo did this in an especially radical way in 1997 with Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body. Beneath apparently simple dresses she introduced irregular paddings that appeared on the back, abdomen, shoulders or hips. The forms seemed to grow in places where a conventional dress would have tried to hide them. The collection was celebrated and attacked precisely because it altered what was expected of a dressed body: it did not correct the silhouette, it disobeyed it.¹
Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, 1997 design. Photograph: we-make-money-not-art. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Twenty years later, The Metropolitan Museum of Art would devote an entire exhibition to Kawakubo under an especially fitting concept: Art of the In-Between, the art of what exists between two places. Between clothing and non-clothing, object and subject, design and non-design. Perhaps that is where the answer begins. Some pieces are difficult to classify because they are made precisely to live on that boundary.²
When fabric stops looking like fabric
We also recognise a garment through its materials. Wool, cotton, silk, leather. We know them because we know how they are supposed to fall, fold or follow the body.
But what happens when a dress is made of fibreglass?
In 2000 Hussein Chalayan presented Remote Control, a rigid piece made from fibreglass and resin, with panels that could open to reveal pink tulle inside. In the original version, these mechanisms worked by remote control. Chalayan described this kind of work as “monuments to ideas”, and the Met itself notes that many of his designs are closer to sculpture than to conventional dress.³
Hussein Chalayan, Remote Control Dress, 2000. Photograph: saschapohflepp. CC BY 2.0.
Seen without a body inside it, Remote Control could easily be mistaken for a futuristic shell, an industrial object or a small piece of architecture. It has volume, surface, interior and mechanism. It occupies a space of its own. The person wearing it no longer seems simply dressed: they appear to have entered a structure.
And perhaps this is where one of the most interesting differences between clothing and sculpture appears. Clothes usually adapt to the body. In these pieces, by contrast, the body has to negotiate with the object.
The body as pedestal
A traditional sculpture needs somewhere to stand. For centuries that place was a pedestal. In the most experimental fashion, that place can be a person.
Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Autumn/Winter 2017, Look 5. Photograph: Premeditated Chaos. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Iris van Herpen has taken this idea into an almost organic territory. Her dresses seem to grow around the body: transparent sheets, three-dimensionally printed structures, surfaces recalling skeletons, wings, waves or microscopic creatures. Her work mixes couture craftsmanship with technology, architecture, science and artistic collaboration. Museums in different countries have presented her garments alongside sculptures, installations and scientific objects; one of her major retrospectives is fittingly titled Sculpting the Senses.⁴
In one piece from her Hybrid Holism collection, for example, an outer PVC structure surrounds the body with biomorphic forms inspired by an architectural installation by Philip Beesley. The reference no longer begins with what a dress should be, but with how living matter might behave.⁵
When a piece begins this way, the body stops being simply what clothing is supposed to cover. It becomes a structure around which something is built.
That also changes the way we look. In a shop, we ask whether a garment would suit us. In front of these works the question changes: we want to know how it was made, what it means, what material we are seeing, how much it weighs, how it moves or even how it manages to remain standing.
Those are questions much closer to the ones we ask in front of sculpture.
Alexander McQueen and the impossibility of separating the work from the spectacle
Alexander McQueen understood very early that clothing could tell something much larger than itself. His collections did not simply present garments one after another: they built environments, characters and narratives in which nature, violence, history, religion, desire, technology and fear appeared.
Alexander McQueen, Angels and Demons, Autumn/Winter 2010, Look 16. Installation view in Savage Beauty. Photograph: Isabell Schulz. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art later described his work as an expansion of fashion’s conventional limits towards forms of cultural and conceptual expression, and his shows came close to installation and performance.⁶
But perhaps the most interesting thing about McQueen is not deciding whether he was a designer or an artist. That debate ends up being rather poor. What is truly interesting is seeing how he managed to make a garment continue to exist after it had lost almost every need to be useful.
A piece may make normal walking impossible, cover the face, exaggerate the body until it becomes unrecognisable or require hours of work in order to exist for a few minutes on a runway. From a purely functional logic, it would be a failure.
From another point of view, it can be exactly the opposite.
The museum changes things
There is also a small trap.
A creation may walk a runway in Paris or London and be called fashion. Years later, exactly the same object may be placed on a mannequin at The Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum or another institution and be contemplated in silence, surrounded by visitors studying its materials and construction as they would study a work of art.
Hussein Chalayan, Remote Control Dress, 2000. Detail. Photograph: we-make-money-not-art. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The object has not changed.
The room has.
Perhaps that is why the boundary between fashion and sculpture is far less solid than we think. Sometimes it depends on material, sometimes on intention, on the impossibility of using the piece in everyday life or on the way it transforms the space around it. But it also depends on us, and on the permission we give certain places to decide how we should look at something.
A chair inside a house is a chair. A chair inside a gallery can become a work.
A dress can cover a body, but it can also alter its anatomy, occupy space, contain an idea and exist even if nobody ever wears it.
A sculpture that breathes
There is, however, something these pieces can do that a marble sculpture cannot.
Breathe with the person wearing them.
Move.
Change while walking.
Sink slightly when the body sits down and then recover its volume. Cast a different shadow with every step. They are works whose form is never completely finished until a person appears inside them.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful part of this relationship.
Traditional sculpture turns material into presence. Fashion can do the same, but it adds something unpredictable: a living body.
That is why there may be no exact moment when clothing becomes sculpture. There is no specific amount of volume, no list of materials and no rule that allows something officially to cross from one side to the other.
Perhaps the boundary appears simply when we stop asking “would I wear it?” and start asking “what am I looking at?”
At that moment the dress may still remain clothing.
But it is already something more.
Sources and references
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Rei Kawakubo — Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/43/702
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/rei-kawakubo
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hussein Chalayan, Remote Control, 2000. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/124594
- Kunsthal Rotterdam, Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses. https://www.kunsthal.nl/en/plan-your-visit/exhibitions/iris-van-herpen/
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Iris van Herpen, piece from the Hybrid Holism collection. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/701654
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. https://www.metmuseum.org/es/met-publications/alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty