MILAN — Fashion and design were largely perceived as feminine creative spheres for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. With her latest exhibition, “Fashion and Interiors: A Gendered Affair” at MoMu — Fashion Museum Antwerp, Romy Cockx shows how modern Western consumer standards in the second half of the 19th century gave rise to a bourgeois ideal of domesticity that linked women to the home. Cockx also shows how midcentury architects had a hand in reversing that trend.
Set to open March 29, Cockx dives deep into how influential designers in modern history explored this concept and how the worlds of fashion and interiors have influenced each other in recent times.
At the heart of the exhibit is a quote from American capitalist critic, economist and author Thorstein Veblen, who summed up the role of the woman in the home in the late 1800s.
“Her sphere is within the household, which she should beautify, and of which she should be the chief ornament,” he wrote in his book “The Theory of the Leisure Class.”
Around the same time, male creatives, including Belgian artist and architect Henry van de Velde, started designing women’s clothes that unified architecture, furniture, decor, clothing and accessories to create a total work of art. “Her body too was heavily draped with layers of fabric and passementerie, causing her to seemingly merge with her interior,” Cockxs said.
Designer Charlotte Perriand on the Chaise longue basculante B 306 which is credited to Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Perriand.
Source : Archives Charlotte Perriand ©ADAGP-AChP 200
Chaging the Tide
Within the exhibit, modernist architects and designers like Adolf Loos, Lilly Reich and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, emerge as catalysts for change. Le Corbusier in particular strove for functionality and was opposed to unnecessary ornament. In his personal life, Le Corbusier’s aim for functionality in every aspect of his life was epitomized by the forestière (French for a person who works in a forest), a jacket the Swiss-French architect is said to have commissioned from the Parisian boutique Arnys in 1947.
Decades later, Belgian fashion designers Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela and Raf Simons, among others, would take this concept further, cross-pollinating these concepts of architecture and product design with modern clothing.
Ann Demeulemeester RTW, fall 2022
Giovanni Giannoni/WWD
In 1983, Demeulemeester and photographer Patrick Robyn purchased Le Corbusier’s only building in Belgium. The building had a lasting impression on the fashion designer’s vision, which embraced Le Corbusier’s sense of purity and symmetry. To support this, porcelain designs Demeulemeester designed for Serax, alongside a jumpsuit from her fall 1996 collection, will be on display.
When Margiela founded his eponymous fashion house in 1988, he chose to display his radical fashion in an all-white environment. Due to budget restraints, he looked for secondhand furniture, often painting it white or covering it in white cotton. “Margiela’s ‘whitewash’ inadvertently echoes one of Le Corbusier’s revolutionary principles, but with a dramatically different result. The architect wanted to erase all forms of decoration by whitewashing, whereas the fashion designer ascribed new worth to discarded objects,” Cockx said.
Another telling piece highlighted by the exhibit is Hussein Chalayan’s iconic coffee table skirt from his fall 2000 collection. It was part of the Turkish-Cypriot designer’s “Afterwords” collection where the last model stepped inside the coffee table and transformed it into a wooden skirt, referencing the experiences of refugees hastily packing up their belongings following the war in Kosovo.
Hussein Chalayan coffee table skirt from his fall 2000 collection.
Marine Serre
The Future is Genderless
Ultimately, the exhibit, which ends Aug. 3, will show how over the last two decades fashion and design have been influenced by societal concerns, address challenges around sustainability and overproduction. It also will illustrate the obsession with home as a modern sanctuary and how fashion brands increasingly incorporate interior elements such as bedding, carpets and chairs into their designs. In the pursuit of minimalism and functionality, high-end fashion and design are nearing genderless distinction. Cockx concluded that the world has finally shed ideals that weighed on humanity, in both a physical and philosophical sense.
“I think because the separate spheres that dictated life between approximatively 1850 and 1960 have largely disappeared in the Western world,” she said.
