Today’s boldest fashion designers’ sculptural looks owe as much to art as fashion, a thread connecting the iconic silhouettes of Cristóbal Balenciaga to the technical mastery of Iris van Herpen.

Fashioning the silhouette to its most exaggerated form, progressive designers are transforming the human figure and challenging sartorial norms to abstract clothing away from the body. This phenomenon blurs the boundaries between art, performance, and self-expression to transcend the celebrity arenas of the catwalk and the red carpet, and questions the nature of what it means to get dressed. Examining the rise of this sculptural mode by designers like Rei Kawakubo or J. W. Anderson, this book puts the most extreme couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear designs in conversation with key works of postwar and contemporary sculpture to unfold the intrinsic relationships between these two genres, and show how each pivot on transformative conceptions of the body. The timely collection includes the extreme and directional looks that have become more popular in the decade and half of social media’s influence. 

Placing, for instance, Christian Dior’s famed 1947 bar suit alongside a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, pairings explore deeper connections in materiality and form familiar to students of art, design, and fashion. Chapters on shaping space, constructing the body, deconstructing forms, animating the body, and technology include pieces by Thierry Mugler, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander McQueen, Iris van Herpen, Issey Miyake, John Galliano, Rick Owens, Luar, J. W. Anderson, Loewe, Margiela, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan, Melitta Baumeister, Comme des Garçons, Alaïa, and Anrealage. The sculptural case and textured uncoated papers extend the themes to a display-worthy object.

About The Author

Ann Marguerite Tartsinis is Assistant Curator in the Department of Architecture + Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.