Fashion, Art, and Architecture at CAA

by Minami Furukawa

This weekend, the College Art Association returned to the windy city to host its 2010 annual art conference for the first time in nine years.  Art scholars, teachers, and developed and aspiring artists alike from across the country flocked to the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Wacker Avenue in downtown Chicago.  Tickets ranging from $45 for a one-time pass, this humble writer, asked to cover a piece of her own choice at this event, enjoyed a rather expensive and rare opportunity to attend a scholarly discussion and peruse a roomful of art publications, all while surrounded by the largest gathering of art academics I have ever shared the company of.

As a former fashion student, the session of my choice naturally fell to “Fashion, Art, and Architecture” on Saturday, February 13th from 9:30am-noon.  The sky was brilliantly blue, and I was in a rather groggy, but bright mood upon entering the bustling hotel lobby.  First reaction:  a dramatic, expo-like setup (had I stumbled into the auto show?) with a huge number and variety of meetings, sessions, and booths that took up two towers within the building (enough for me to lose my way while searching for the correct room).

Barbara Layne demonstrating at the CAA conference

The architecturally conscientious room in which this particular session took place, was curiously fitting for its topic.  From the ceiling hung a sculptural light fixture haunting the room with a warm orange, crawling across the surface in undulating waves of triangular angles.  Large panels lining the walls outlined subtle shapes of plants, and revealed glowing images of the Chicago landscape when introduced to darkness.

The four speakers, all associated with various art-related universities across America and Canada, discussed topics pertaining to the relationship of fashion and architecture.  The unifying themes in each presentation touched upon the parallels in form and design between the two art types, as well as the relationship that architecture directly employs on the body.

Barbara Layne’s presentation at the CAA conference

In “Archigram: Tailoring the Future”, Valerie Rangel of Dominican University and IADT discussed the form-driven and experimentalist style of ‘60s fashion.  Describing mass-produced and innovative designs of the time, throw-away paper dresses and pajamas were described with the “technoccentric” trend for creating a futuristic design for architectural landscapes.  Garments such as the “Suitaloon” by Michael Webb and the “Curtain Wall House” by Shigeru Ban were examples of fashion and architecture crossing their respective bounds, forging into the other by their progressive use of material, shape, and structural components.

Barbara Layne of Studio subTela captured the interest of the crowd, straying from the scholarly thesis-driven presentation of the other speakers, and demonstrating her artistic process and investigations.  Weaving LEDs into fabric to create wall hangings and garments, Layne melds science and futuristic technological processes into the ancient craft of hand-manipulated fabric making.  Her work is both experimental and artistic, while conveying an incredibly strong sense of humanism and emotion; a pair of garments worn on separate bodies display individual scrolling texts upon the wearers’ backs, yet merge into one continuous message crawling through both garments when their hands are joined.  In a newer project named “Wearable Absense”, a garment incorporates wireless technologies and a portable database to connect the wearer to someone who is absent from them.  The hood allows a “memory”—anything from a loved one’s voice to their favorite song—to be heard by the subject.  The garment is able to analyze the wearer’s mood and determine what he/she “needs” from the absent person through sensors that calculate body temperature, heartbeat, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response.  Images, text, video, and sound are all retrievable through the garment itself, as well as through a handheld PDA which carries the database.

The strong commonalities in such seemingly unrelated topics became obviously prevalent to me to an inspiring degree as I sat listening to these speakers.  Interaction and stress of the communal in architecture and fashion holds a key role in determining one’s direct reaction to the object.  As Mara Gladstone compared the shows curated by Deutsch designers Viktor and Rolf at the Mori Museum in Tokyo and London’s Barbican Centre, the body reacts to scale and color in a physical way, as the museum acts as a body itself through the structure of its rooms.