Art couture

The heart of fashion is pattern. And just when we think fashion has run out of thread, it reinvents itself and shows us another side of ourselves, writes GEMMA TIPTON

HAS FASHION COME to a full stop? After all, there are only so many ways you can rework a jacket and a pair of trousers. Or are there? Every year, and several times a season, the fashion industry presents us with what is new, even though that “new” has often been plundered from other eras or cultures. And, every year, fashion offers the promise of looking and feeling different while still carrying forward the comforting sense of wearing the same things as everyone else. Fashion is in flux, referencing the past to create a fleeting present. It reflects external forces, such as climate, society and the economy. It is said that hemlines go down in recessions and up in good times. It also illustrates our own internal desires.

It might seem frivolous, but the story of fashion is fundamentally the story of ourselves. Across history and geography, what we have chosen to wear reveals in detail what has mattered most. It may be about protection, status, uniformity, individualism, display and attraction, but fashion also allows us to remake ourselves and to present to the world an image of ourselves as we would like to be seen. Fashion differs from art and other craft in that our response to it is dictated by our bodies as well as our minds. You can like a pot or a painting whether you are fat or thin, or even if yellow doesn’t suit you, but your affinity for fashion has more physical ties.

As with any creative process, fashion is about enabling the ideas and images in the mind of the designer to find form. Whatever its colours, shapes or sizes, the heart of fashion is pattern. Pattern is the template through which dimensionless ideas become real and two-dimensional drawings emerge into three-dimensional garments. The pattern is the basis of all design: it is the computer code, the DNA of a dress, jacket or suit. Pattern-cutting allows for both mass production and the creation of bespoke pieces tailored to fit unique forms.

Masters of tailoring and cutting, such as Vivienne Westwood, have changed our perceptions of fashion and tailoring, while still working within the boundaries of the traditional discipline.

But if tailoring seems an old-fashioned idea, then picture these: a dress that “grows” itself from microbial cellulose; another designed according to the rhythms of Bach’s Cello Suite No 4; and a hunter jacket that transforms, via 83 zips, into an animal-head trophy. There’s a glove that appears courtesy of a 3D printer, and a computer programme that creates clothing to suit your changing moods. These pieces are part of Block Party, which opens at the National Craft Gallery in Kilkenny next weekend and will show the work of artists, designers, craftspeople, tailors and scientists who are all pushing the boundaries of what material can be made to do.

Ann Mulrooney, the curator of the gallery, notes how “fashion is more than just an individual statement of personality or status: it also articulates a lot about society in terms of the ethics and politics of making and consumption”. And Block Party turns the cliches of gender roles in fashion, cultural icons and ideas of tradition on their heads.

Thus the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004, clothes his sculptures in Victorian dress while deftly subverting this image of colonial power by fashioning the clothes from African fabrics. The jacket with 83 zips is by Rohan Chhabra, a London-based Indian designer. It is a masterful piece of pattern-making and tailoring, as the zips and buttons open to reveal, lurking within the cut of the jacket, the head of a hunted animal, and with it the idea that clothes not only present an image of us to the world but can cast us in the roles of hunter, killer, aggressor and victim.

The exhibition was put together by the artist and curator Lucy Orta, whose previous projects have included tent-dresses for homeless people, experimental dinners and an Antarctic expedition. She also participates in this show, with D-form, an online interactive pattern-maker that shapes a jacket to suit your state of mind. This is similar to Simon Thorogood’s SoundForms, another piece of interactive design software that allows you to base dress patterns, shapes and colours on pieces of music, ranging from Bach to Erik Satie to John Cage.

SoundForms explores the idea of synaesthesia: that some people see sound as colour, or smell music; nevertheless, the input for both Orta and Thorogood’s work is still based on the human input that has created the pattern, or the algorithm that says, “This is what colour C sharp is, and this is what anxiety looks like when it comes to the sleeve of a shirt.”

As Thorogood puts it, “Pattern-cutting is about creating form for the body. It is a transitional process in which the ideas and themes behind a garment or collection begin to directly address the human form. It is a coming together of the abstract and the practical, and where a concept becomes alive and animate.”

Rhian Solomon’s disturbing film Bodycloth looks at the connection between tailoring and plastic surgery, and lingers on both the cutting of flesh and the cutting of leather. Solomon raises the unsettling notion that fashion shapes bodies as well as their coverings. Plastic surgery defines silhouette and skin, and we are becoming as much crafted creations as the clothes we wear.

FASHION AND PATTERNS tell stories of our lives and of the past. Old clothes in photographs define eras through their styles, and sometimes you can get the sense that the old clothes themselves are still inhabited by the ghosts of the bodies that once wore them.

But future technologies are reshaping how we make what we wear, and even creating new materials to use. Mulrooney agrees, saying, “Often people have such old-fashioned notions of ‘craft’; it’s great to be able to underline the necessity of craft skills in developing cutting-edge, challenging and dynamic work like this.” Craft, in this instance, includes Philip Delamore’s digitally manufactured glove, Suzanne Lee’s ScarBodice (the BioCouture dress made from microbial cellulose) and the art duo Rubedo’s wearable architecture based on 3D scans of the artists’ bodies, cast in resin.

Traditional tailoring is celebrated in the work of the French artist Tia-Calli Borlase, although she uses those traditional skills to create the outlines of animal bodies. At this level, pattern-making is nothing short of the ability to break something down, to really see the component parts at their most intricate level. In his essay in the exhibition catalogue, Alan Cannon-Jones draws us into a world of cutters, undercutters, trimmers, strikers, improvers and kippers: the female seamstresses who always worked in pairs to safeguard them from the attentions of amorous tailors.

Against these time-honoured skills, developing technologies are creating fabrics and techniques that were unimaginable a generation ago. The Israeli artists Raw-Edges (Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay) use new methods to turn wood veneer into a skin, then fashion idiosyncratic furniture from it.

Just as the architect Frank Gehry was unable to fulfil his designs for sinuous, curvaceous buildings – including the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Disney Center in Los Angeles – until technology caught up with his vision, the new forms in Block Party are new only in expression. Just like fashion, it appears that there is nothing new to be thought of; only the ability to realise and create what some people have always been able to imagine has changed. This is a fascinating exhibition that presents an exciting and sometimes unsettling view of the way we clothe ourselves. It also ultimately proves, despite all the innovation, that it’s very difficult to do much more to the basic form of a suit.

Block Party is at the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny, from March 31st to May 16th. See nationalcraftgallery.ie

Around the block: Party patterns

Fashion show

Contemporary Irish tailoring by the Dublin-based collective, Project 51, plus a peek at the autumn/winter collections of Jennifer Rothwell, Sinéad Doyle, Claire O’Connor and Que-Va. Saturday, March 31st, 3.30pm. Admission free

Wardrobe upcycling workshop

A full-day workshop on upgrading your old clothes, with Deirdre Harte and Rosie O'Reilly of Re-Dress Better fashion initiative. Thursday, April 19th, 10am-5pm. Admission €40/€30; booking essential, niamh.finn@kilkennycoco.ie

Gallery tours

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 11am during the exhibition run. Admission free; booking essential, admin@nationalcraftgallery.ie

Late date

Informal tour, glass of wine and fashion make-and-do. Friday, April 27th, 6.30pm.

Admission free