At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idealized female form in the West was sculpted by artifice, with restrictive corsetry and voluminous petticoats. During the century, with the exception of the 1950s, fashion’s approach to the torso grew progressively more lenient. Developments in elasticized textiles that mold to the body’s natural curves assisted contemporary designers, including Azzedine Alaïa and Hervé Léger, in realizing their respective paradigms of the female form.

Although costume history is rife with sculptural manipulations of the body, the symmetry of the human armature was rarely questioned. Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake, addressing the body as only part of the integral whole of the garment, have used asymmetry as the core design concept in creating garments that virtually stand alone—alternative forms dependent on, but not defined by, the body.

Reminiscent of the architectonic turn-of-the-twentieth-century underwear, contemporary garments also rely on additive structures or structural textiles to create extensions to the natural silhouette and change the perceived shape of the body. The result may be an ingenious twist on the historical figure, a freestanding geometrical model, or a piece of kinetic sculpture.

Since both architecture and fashion are essentially constructed from flat two-dimensional materials, it is not surprising that practitioners in each field find inspiration in the other’s techniques, forms, and surfaces. In recent years, architects have adopted techniques such as printing, pleating, folding, draping, and weaving to develop more complex exterior surfaces, or skins, for their buildings, while fashion designers have looked to architecture for ways to construct clothes with greater volume and inherent structural integrity. The translation of
drapery folds into a rigid building skin is seen in Office dA’s Zahedi House (unbuilt, 1998),
which features a taut surface of corrugated metal that is distorted and manipulated into gentle curtain-like folds on one façade. The play with volume can be seen in Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (1987–2003), in which a skin of stainless-steel panels creates expressive curved forms, and in Rei Kawakubo’s Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection (spring/summer 1997), which features exaggeratedly mutated forms achieved by padding garments in unexpected places. While these techniques are often used by architects to create greater visual interest on a building’s exterior and to manipulate the volumetric forms of the interior, in the case of Winka Dubbeldam/Archi-Tectonics’s Greenwich Street Project in New York (2000–04), the folded glass façade was also developed as a way to meet the practical requirements of the city’s strict setback laws.

Designers in both fields have recently begun to develop structural skins that incorporate
the bones, or structure, into the surface of a building or a garment. Toyo Ito’s Tod’s Omotesando Building (2002–04) and Mikimoto Ginza 2 (2004–05) in Tokyo feature glass and concrete skins that join structure and façade in a single surface to create a distinctive and elegant overall pattern. A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) is a revolutionary industrial process and product created by fashion designer Miyake Issey and design engineer Fujiwara Dai that is a means for producing seamless garments, complete pieces of clothing that do not require sewing.