Fashion: The Latest Architecture and News

Architect Tadao Ando has been commissioned to design this year’s Costume Institute exhibition highlighting the work of Karl Lagerfeld. The opening of the exhibition titled “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” was marked by the world-renown Met Gala, a fundraising event attended by celebrities and personalities perceived to be culturally relevant in the fashion scene. Perceived as a thematic and conceptual essay on Lagerfeld’s work, rather than a traditional retrospective, the exhibition aims to illustrate the designer’s method of creative expression and its significance in the industry.

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Continuing its long-lasting collaboration with Prada, OMA’S research and design branch AMO created a cinematic scenography for the brand’s 2022 Fall Winter Menswear show. Yellow carpeting envelops the hall of Deposito at Fondazione Prada, reimagined as a theatrical setting with olive-green theatre chairs and stage lighting. In juxtaposition, sci-fi looking metal-clad tunnels bathed in neon lights emphasize “the uncanny relationship between the theatrical and technological atmospheres”.

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Designed by award-winning architect Rudy Ricciotti, the designer of the MuCEM in Marseille, the Jean-Boutin Stadium in Paris, and the Islamic Arts Exhibition in the Louvre Museum, the Manufacture de la Mode reintroduces Chanel's intricate craftsmanship in an architectural and urban context. Architectural photographer Simon Garcia uncovers the newly-inaugurated fashion community in a series of photographs.

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The purpose of architectural photography is to show a design in the best possible way, with the artform often characterized by perspective correction and atmospheric lighting. However, few architectural photographers have experimented with other artistic disciplines. Miguel de Guzmán, Paul Vu and Jules Couartou are among those who have challenged the limits of this form of photography, generating an interesting crossover between architecture photography, fashion and performances. In their images, the relationship between space and the user is shown through a scene designed to register an effect on the viewer. The results are images which are full of creativity.

Greek architect Viktoria Lytra has created a set of images exploring the relationship and interaction between architecture and fashion. FormFollowsFashion investigates the common purpose of architecture fashion, to create shelter for the human body, placing aesthetic as a common factor in novel approaches to the design of clothes and buildings.

Lytra’s series features various movements and styles, such as minimalism, deconstructivism, and postmodernism, playing on common geometric characteristics such as folks, pleats, curves, prints, and twists.

Nike has announced that it will release a special edition of its Air Max 1 range, inspired by the iconic Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The special edition pays tribute to the Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-designed structure, which is credited by designer Tinker Hatfield as the inspiration behind his original Air Max 1 range.

Two upcoming editions of the Air Max 1 will honor the building, with colored tubes appearing along the seams and lines of the fabric, as well as the sole. A large P logo on the translucent sole offers a further tribute to the controversial structure, opened in 1977.

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In what has to be one of the most spectacular collisions of high fashion and architecture, fashion designer Guo Pei has tapped into the "immutable" qualities of Gothic buildings with a series of outfits inspired by vaults, spires, flying buttresses, and elaborate window tracery. According to Vogue, the Chinese designer described her work as "a dialogue between the human body and spatial dimension," while Pei's own Facebook post explained her Fall 2018 collection with just a short phrase: "Time flows unhurriedly, while architecture stands immutably."

Many of the designs in Pei's collection seem to have been conceived as architectural structures in themselves, projecting outwards from the body to create striking church-like forms. Converting the rigid stone structures of the Gothic style into fabrics designed to hang from the human body is clearly a challenging technical feat, and proves extremely satisfying for architecture-obsessed onlookers when achieved with the audacity brought to her work by Pei.

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Villa Malaparte, Adalberto Libera's modern Italian classic, is featured as the backdrop in Saint Lauren's spring 2018 campaign starring modern English classic, Kate Moss. The video for the campaign, directed by Nathalie Canguilhem, positions Moss on the dramatic and monumental steps of the villa, an architectural promenade that seems to lead directly to the sky.