FROCK AS METAPHOR
The AFR Magazine | September 2009
by Marion Hume
Philosopher, sculptor, alchemist, Hussein Chalayan is all of them. But he does like to see his dresses out and about.
This is a style announcement. The era of bling is officially over. Please reset your watches as we enter, via austerity, a new era of audacious creativity (well, hopefully).
So long ago does the era of bling now seem that one can chart its beginning, its zenith, even the precise moment of its end. It started in New York in December 1997 with the private sample sale of Fendi Baguettes which ushered in the It bag; climbed to 2003 when Marc Jacobs collaborated with the Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami on the Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore and, finally, crashed on September 23, 2008, when a model fell off Prada platforms in Milan and hit the concrete just as the global markets took a sickening dive following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
But while some are gnashing their teeth and panicking that a golden age is over, others are more sanguine, wondering whether, for those designers whose talent goes beyond how much hardware they can pile on a handbag, the current cleansing might prove fruitful. Which is a long-winded way of saying that these could be interesting times for Hussein Chalayan, given he is one of the great creative forces of the day. Chalayan, who was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, 38 years ago and has lived in Britain since he was sent away to boarding school at the age of 12, has long been more interested in his own preoccupations than the prevailing mood. Thus, while intelligent, well read and acutely aware of the economic downturn, he does not seem fretful when we catch up over tea at his pristine white east London studio. (We first met, at a much grimier London studio, following his debut show in 1994.) “Of course we are trying to cut things down,” he says, “but money doesn’t [necessarily] make you creative.”
Back in 1993, “green” clothes meant hairy hippies in hemp, and recycling and reuse were hardly considered. Only now, even among those who boast eco credentials and carbon neutral goals, is it beginning to be recognised that it is not just where a garment comes from that matters, it is where it is going to end up, so that its eventual disposal must be considered even at the point of manufacture.
Yet, unless you are very much a fashion insider (or the sort of art aficionado who plans holidays around exhibits at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, or Groninger Museum, The Netherlands or the Design Museum, London – all of which have exhibited Chalayan’s work), it is unlikely you know much about Chalayan, even though he has staged 30 fashion shows (31 by the time you read this), each of them more extraordinary than the last. Chalayan is rarely quoted in fashion articles, because he is not one for the sort of pithy sound bites that the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Michael Kors and Tom Ford are so brilliant at, and fashion reporters on the run between shows don’t dare ask, “What inspired you?” or “What’s the show about?” for fear he might tell them, which can take a while.
Fluent in English, Turkish, French and Italian, this designer, who describes himself as “part Anatolian, part Aegean, part Balkan, part Mediterranean and a Londoner and British, although certainly not English”, resists pigeonholing and is more likely to be inspired by the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein than he is to think “there’s tough times ahead, best do coats”. Most unusually for a fashion designer, he doesn’t duck the big issues or even so much as play-act at being flighty. For him, it is imperative that social unrest, global migration, modern identity be explored through clothes. This may explain why the eponymous business he founded in 1994 was not bought out in the boom years along with those of contemporaries who made personal fortunes when they signed up with luxury conglomerates such as LVMH, Richemont or Gucci Group.
While Chalayan’s fame rests on what he calls his “monuments” – incredible garments which embody speed or are lit by 200 moving lasers to explore the parallels between ancient sun worship and the modern cult of celebrity – at first glance, a chief executive with an MBA might assume such talent would be hard to harness commercially. But they would be wrong. For behind the monumental pieces are commercial clothes that inspire the high street. Chalayan may well be the most referenced and least acknowledged designer working today. One example of many is his recurring contrasts of graphic bright shapes against soft florals that have become a staple in summer dresses for mass-market retailer Zara.
Yet this is not some story of a starving artist who has been ripped off. While Chalayan has never been bought out and does not own a mansion, he has invested the profits of two lucrative and consecutive three-year consultancies – the first with TSE cashmere in New York, the second with Asprey in London – into his own company. He may yet prove to be the smartest of the pack, given those who sold out now have itchy shareholders to fret about. In contrast, Chalayan recently signed with sportswear company, Puma, part of the PPR conglomerate, which also has Gucci Group in its stable.
Along with the cash, Chalayan negotiated for access to the cutting-edge technology of the sportswear brand as well as a plug-in to the fashion expertise of Gucci Group; the latter without having to answer to Gucci Group CEO, Robert Polet, a softly spoken but resolute operator who is expected to make some tough calls about who stays on the group’s slate in the not too distant future. Chalayan’s own company instead benefits from a widely experienced CEO in Giorgio Belloli who was recruited from Prada and who reports directly up the PPR chain (thus bypassing Gucci Group).
The subject under discussion as we sip our tea is fashion versus art. “I don’t see fashion as lesser. I see it as richer because it brings in so many worlds,” says Chalayan, then adds, “although, when your work is cross-disciplinary, people don’t know where to place you. Fashion is not taken as seriously as art … artists are seen as a more significant, more critical part of life but I think there can be a more interesting thought process behind fashion. I’m fascinated with creating new micro-geographies of the body. I’m interested in ideas and also in clothes looking sexual and in sexuality.”
On paper, he might sound opinionated but, face-to-face, is a deeply thoughtful person who asks as many questions as he answers. Chalayan is perpetually curious and believes that “as life is short I want to explore all I can” and is fearless in pushing boundaries, both in design and conversation (which, by now, has moved to religion and what he considers the cannibalistic elements of Roman Catholic transubstantiation, where the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ during the course of the sacrament). To him, chit-chat on a cold afternoon might also embrace alienation and identity, the movement of the world’s peoples because of conflict, fire, flood.
Hussein Chalayan’s earliest memories are of Cyprus, the small and bitterly divided country of his birth, where a nagging unease was ever-present. “Our house was right near the border, so we lived with a mixture of curiosity and fear. We would get Greek TV and Greek radio but were not able to interact with Greeks, so there was this strange schism; the sense of dealing with the invisible,” he recalls, then adds that while he can’t speak Greek, “I know it, I feel it.”
From the Turkish side came a sense of being part of a cultural melting pot, “because the Ottoman empire is so mixed and so ancient and I think that fascination with wanting to know who I am is very strong in me”. Chalayan adds that, given the Turkish alphabet changed in 1928 as part of the reforms of the country’s modernising leader, Atatürk, “when you can’t read your own history in the original writing, perhaps you are forced to be new, flexible and adaptable”.
Istanbul, which he visits regularly both in person and through his work, fascinates as the fault line between East and West. Chalayan remains one of the only broadly Western designers to explore the power of the Muslim veil, notoriously in a show where models were left naked, yet with their faces covered. “But that was 1997; it wasn’t an issue at that time,” he shrugs. “I wouldn’t address it in the same way now; it’s not necessary, there are too many angry people. Of course, inevitably, it [was seen] in a political context, but my initial exploration was about how you can acquire an anonymous existence; [about] how, when you create a dress code, you create a parameter around you because people don’t know how to enter that zone.”
As people flee from wars and the wrath of nature in increasing numbers, Chalayan’s constant exploration of exile also seems timely. His Geotropics show of 1999 reflected on how borders, formed either by man or nature, shape culture, and ended with monumental dresses that became chairs to carry with you, a ball gown that morphed with a (functioning) table. Ambimorphous (2002) explored notions of how ethnic dress adapts to amalgamate into ‘Western’ dress. In 2005, Chalayan was invited to represent Turkey at the 51st Venice Biennale and made a short film in which Tilda Swinton plays a biologist, seen in the lab extracting DNA samples from the clothes of ‘foreign’ females and then sequencing these to reveal how these women look. (Science has yet to catch up with this process from Chalayan’s imagination.)
Yet the designer is also enraptured by things most of us hardly notice; what he calls “blind spots, the gaps between things”. Commercial flight is the ultimate “blind spot” he says, because, “you get on a plane and you go somewhere but actually the whole idea of getting there is an extension of the space you’ve just come from”. Beyond this, a fascination with ærodynamics has lead to a firm grasp of the rigorous principles of æronautical design and extraordinary experiments with radio-controlled clothing. His 2007 show, titled One Hundred and Eleven, explored 111 years of Western dress and ended with costume history condensed to just five mechanical outfits that – as parts moved and shifted shape in front of an amazed audience, from 19th century constriction to the freedom of the flapper dress to the sexual freedom of the ’60s and the modern day – was happening as the models stood still on stage.
“But sometimes it is the simpler things that are harder to achieve,” says Chalayan, referring to (much copied) little dresses constructed to seem lighter than air. The ultimate thrill, he says, comes not from being fashion’s brainiac, but from “seeing people wear my stuff. I know the seaming on that coat has been acquired through the research that led to a remote-controlled sculpture, but I like seeing it as something you can wear, which I could not have achieved otherwise.” Being exhibited in museums might be an honour, “but I enjoy the way design processes become relevant to daily life. That’s the exciting balance for me.”
