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Writer's pictureThea Hwang
Mar 5

Review: Dress to Impress


In February, I went to Dress to Impress: The Intersection of Fashion and the Built Environment, a talk by Andi Soos, an independent curator from Budapest, Hungary, and Avery Trufelman, podcast host and radio producer.


We think of architecture as hard, fixed, and permanent, while fashion is soft, flowing and seasonal. But the two disciplines have many intersections explored by Soos and Trufelman during this talk at the Center for Architecture. For one, fashion and architecture are both forms of public art. While clothing and building structures are functional means of providing warmth and shelter for the human body, they also communicate ideas about identity, aesthetics, politics, etc. Because fashion and architecture are seen by others, they are a medium between the designer/architect and the viewer. 



Tamás Király (1952-2013) was introduced by Soos and Trufelman as an avant-garde Hungarian underground fashion designer active from the 1980s on, during the waning years of the communist regime in Hungary. An “anti-fashion world fashion designer,” Király’s clothes were not made to be reproduced or sold. This 1987 Red Star dress, pictured on left, folded out to resemble that symbol of communist iconography and is perhaps meant as a political critique? Or not? The cover picture for this post depicts a collection of geometric shapes and forms, which Király showed at Dressater-Dressed to Thrill, an 1988 international fashion show held at a disused train station on the border of East and West Berlin. 






Here is a hat American architect Frank Gehry designed for Lady Gaga in 2009. The hat clearly evokes Gehry’s architectural signature of shiny metallic curves reflecting the interplay of light and shade. See the next pictures of the interior of the Issey Miyake boutique in Tribeca and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, both designed by Gehry. With the undulating curves and waves in the hat, the interior and building, Gehry was the most apropos example of the fashion-architecture link that Soos and Trufelman discussed.







For a contemporary avant-garde fashion designer, Soos and Trufelman discussed Virgil Abloh (1980-2021). This ensemble, pictured on right, was part of Abloh’s final collection for Louis Vuitton. (You can also see the outlines of Király’s Red Star dress in the sculptural forms of the angel wings.) I did a little research into this collection and found out that an architectural structure, a Louis Dreamhouse, was built for its January 2022 runway presentation to showcase Abloh’s design ethos of seeing the world through the eyes of a child and freeing us from the dress codes of our social archetypes. Gender binaries, expressions and identities were subverted and rules were broken, with the angel wings physically manifesting this throwing off of constraints. 


Of the runway’s cutting edge creations that we can’t envision seeing worn on the street, Trufelman said “things aren’t wearable until they are,” just as in architecture, “something is avant-garde until it isn’t.” Fashion and architecture progress along parallel paths – something new emerges and shocks the world, but as more and more eyes gaze upon the new, it gradually seems less new and begins its slow evolution to acceptance and maybe even the new normal.



Further Reading


After hearing Soos and Trufelman’s discussion, I read up a little on Király and the Abloh final runway show:


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