Friday 3 April 2015

Quotes from Alison Gill

Taken from 'Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes' in 'Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture'.

"The term deconstruction has entered the vocabulary of international fashion magazines, a label associated specifically with the work of Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten amongst others, and more loosely used to describe garments on a runway that are “unfinished,” “coming apart,” “recycled,” “transparent” or “grunge.”"

"Martin Margiela, a graduate of the Antwerp Royal Academy of Arts, and identified by Spindler and Cunningham as a leading proponent of “deconstructionism,” appear to share with deconstructivist architecture a point of connection around the analytics of construction."

"Margiela sells linings extracted from recovered “vintage” dresses, giving these linings a chance of a new-old life “on the outside,” that is, as lining dresses in their own right. His dresses are made from mis-matched fabrics, lining silks with jerseys, and one can see the inside mechanics of the dress structure — darts, facings, and zippers. Or old jackets have been re-cut, tacked, sewn and re-detailed, their seams and darts reversed and exposed to the outside."

"Accepting that a seamstress or tailor performs a certain labour of “outfitting” bodies and giving them an enclothed form, a labour stitched inside as the secrets of a finished garment, a secret that is kept by the garment itself as it performs “seamlessly,” Margiela literally brings these secrets to its surface."



Maison Margiela Spring 2015 Couture

"Deconstruction in fashion is something like an auto-critique of the fashion system: It displays an almost X-ray capability to reveal the enabling conditions of fashion’s bewitching charms (i.e., charms conveyed in the concepts ornament, glamour, spectacle, illusion, fantasy, creativity, innovation, exclusivity, luxury repeatedly associated with fashion) and the principles of its practice (i.e., form, material, construction, fabrication, pattern, stitching, finish)."

"At one level, the word “deconstruction” suggests a simple reversal of construction and therefore, at this common-sense level, a reading of clothes that look unfinished, undone, destroyed as “deconstructed” fits. With this view, the many who know the work of the garment-maker — cutting, constructing, altering — that is, a uni-directional making toward a goal of a “finished” garment, will not find deconstruction fashion startlingly original or more than a reversal of this practice of the garment-maker."

"Margiela deconstructs the aura of the designer garment, and by extension the industry that upholds the myth of innovation, by messing with its integrity and innovation, by stitching a dialogue with the past into its future. When his recycled garments are literally turned inside out, apart from ravaging the finish of the garment, the frame that holds them together is also revealed like a clothing skeleton."

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