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Chalayan at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs

The hybrid fashion by the Turkish-Cypriot designer treads the border between fashion, design and architecture.

Plots and narratives are skillfully integrated with postmodern philosophy in the large display cases of the Parisian Chalayan exhibition which, featuring numerous videos and an installation, relies more on pictures and images than actual clothes. The few garments on display are captivating and more like examples of life experience manifested in new materials. Their daring forms intermeshed with conceptual practice on a collision route with the harsh laws of glamour and business that govern the modern-day fashion fairytale. The two floors of the exhibition take two directions—one follows the seasonal cadence of a trade in which the Turkish-Cypriot designer is far more than a protagonist and very much a tastemaker with 17 years of collections behind him. The other illustrates his artistic practice, which sits on the boundaries of very different disciplines, leaning strongly towards design and architecture.

Chalayan's fashion is a perfect hybrid product created by careful selection from the strict interpretative variables of a profession that is founded on technical precision and intellectual rigor. The exhibition has no precise chronology except that it starts from 1993 and a diploma collection at the prestigious Central Saint Martins in London that immediately brought him to the attention of those in the business when his Buried Dresses became key to the contemporary concept of beauty. It was a legendary collection revealing the expert hand of an alchemist, and he managed to bring a touch of criticism to an Eldorado that was churning out names that still matter in contemporary fashion.
Inertia Collection, Spring / Summer 2009. © Christopher Moore.
Inertia Collection, Spring / Summer 2009. © Christopher Moore.
After being buried with iron filings for weeks, the garments in that collection flew off in scraps of fabric, labels and appliqués to tell other tales. Exhibited here is a splendid, intact specimen from his private collection. Next comes a long period of experimentation that knows no Fall/Winter or Spring/Summer. Hard to constrain in exhibition form, the long list of events presented in this retrospective is recreated by handpicking from bold adventures, which in the booklet accompanying the exhibition are arranged like strongly evocative film titles: Temporal Meditations, Genometrics, Anaesthetics, with date, place and time of presentation. These fashion shows, presentations and everything else that Chalayan has managed to invent undermine the liturgy of fashion, while carving out a very consistent path for himself.
Before Minus Now Collection, Spring / Summer 2000. © Christopher Moore.
Before Minus Now Collection, Spring / Summer 2000. © Christopher Moore.
His half-poetic, half-technological style features in the weft and weave of his epic personal exhibition, with stories, impressions and adventures regulated by everyday life. Chalayan respects his audience, to which he offers a result—a picture or sometimes just a garment—the creative process of which may not even be revealed. What the designer does not fail to convey is his ability to construct narratives, with which he plays recklessly, even managing to bend the structure of passing time. An obsessive interest in morphing and the transformation of the female silhouette has accompanied his every creation and produced memorable collections, One Hundred and Eleven being a paradigmatic example of this. The video recording the catwalk of his 2009 Spring/Summer Collection is simultaneously a sophisticated parade, a spectacular catalogue and an anthology-glossary winding its way through decades of couture iconography.
Chalayan's fashion is the perfectly hybrid product created by carefully picking from the strict interpretative variables of a profession that is founded on technical precision and intellectual rigor.
Left: Inertia Collection, Spring / Summer 2009. © Christopher Moore. Right: Temporal Mediation Collection, Spring / Summer 2004. © Christopher Moore.
Left: Inertia Collection, Spring / Summer 2009. © Christopher Moore. Right: Temporal Mediation Collection, Spring / Summer 2004. © Christopher Moore.
The technological quality is always of the highest, allowing onlookers to both understand the metamorphosis of the clothes and reflect on current events. The Aeroplane Dress, a black and white film from 1998, shows a dress made of resin and fashioned on aeronautical forms but the object-performance also offers an excuse to evoke topics of international migrations, wars and conflicts. As does Absent Presence, another work presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale in which an elegant Tilda Swinton, in this context neither quite actress nor model, plays a biologist who takes DNA samples from the clothes of illegal immigrants. She then analyses and manipulates them to develop a number of garments that are both fascinating sculptures and a stigmatisation of the security paranoia that surrounds us.

Centred firmly on the concept of hybrid cultures, Chalayan's fashion and exhibition sum up with a model of his Floating Dress, decorated with crystal pollens that fluctuate and reconfigure, destabilising the inertia of many geographies in contemporary style.
Ivo Bonacorsi
View of exhibition installation at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. Photo by Luc Boegly.
View of exhibition installation at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. Photo by Luc Boegly.
Left: Geotropics Collection, Spring / Summer 1999. © DR. Right: After Words Collection, Fall / Winter 2000. © Christopher Moore.
Left: Geotropics Collection, Spring / Summer 1999. © DR. Right: After Words Collection, Fall / Winter 2000. © Christopher Moore.
Readings Collection, Spring / Summer 2008. © Christopher Moore.
Readings Collection, Spring / Summer 2008. © Christopher Moore.
Left: Genometrics Collection, Fall / Winter 2005. © Christopher Moore. Right: Afterwords Collection, Fall / Winter 2000. © Christopher Moore.
Left: Genometrics Collection, Fall / Winter 2005. © Christopher Moore. Right: Afterwords Collection, Fall / Winter 2000. © Christopher Moore.

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