1. april 2000 - 30 july 20000
Musée Galiera - Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris 10 avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie France - 75116 Paris

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Fashion Designers as Alchemists of Materials
Until the 1960's, fashion evolves in a clear way. Further upstream, the basic research of textile chemistry multiplies possibilities which the fashion industry absorbs downstream. Benefiting from an extensive range of choices, dressmakers, designers, and artists at first take these textiles without modifying them. A few pioneers in the 1970's reinterpret and modify textiles according to their own creativity. Designers are also going to look for the most unfinished materials they can find: horsehair (Issey Miyake), natural organic sponge (Jean-Charles de Castelbajac), linen and sea plants (Olivier Lapidus), pineapple (Lecoanet Hemant), rattan (Thierry Mugler), galuchat-treated sharkskin (Versace), cement (Paco Rabanne), glass (Corinne Cobson), gold (Adeline André), and feathers (Dai Rees) To echo these experiments, the artist Sheila Hicks exposes a previously undisplayed work here entitled "The Standing Stone of Ouessant" realized with steel fibers.

Whether chemists or alchemists, today's garment and accessory designers claim recognition for their work in the creation or the transformation of materials. Designers, who compare themselves to chefs, prepare their projects like they were creating recipes. The model draws its sense from this, as an expression of the artists' savoir-faire. There are now many designers who subject all kinds of materials and tissues to the tests of steam, reduction or dilution in chemical solutions, twisting and tearing, and even temporary burial (the rusty dress of Hussein Chalayan, 1995). The idea now is to take a material and martyr it, crush it, lacerate it, and then bring it back to life. These manipulations give birth to surprising models, among which are the heat embossed velour jacket of Nigel Atkinson (1990), and the melted shirt of Kosuke Tsumura (1996)

The methods of assembling the different parts of an article of clothing have also been the object of multiple transformation. You can de-clothe jackets (Armani), show the stitching (Nanni Strada, Michel Schreiber), separate the pieces (Martin Margiela, Walter ... ), assemble the different components by the eyelets (Mariot-Chanet), or even glue them together with transparent Neoprene (Junko Koshino) ... The possibilities now seem to be endless. So Shinichiro Arakawa invites us to take down ready-to-be-worn clothing nailed to a frame of wood, while Issey Miyake engages us to cut up a tube of jersey material to make a dress, socks, a hat, gloves, etc.

It is sure that the intrusion of new technologies of computer-assisted design and fabrication has shaken up the chain of textile production. A video by Lectra Systems, a company founded in 1973 near Bordeaux, attests to this. Lectra Systems designs software for stylistic concerns, model and pattern making, sizes, and cuts ... Ink jet printing (Hil Driessen) permits the same quality of impression as serigraphy. However, computerized tools don't make manual tools obsolete. The models of Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Comme des Garcons, and Yohji Yamamoto illustrate the force and complementarity of tools-manual and computer.

Epilogue
Turning to the year 2000, we know that the insertion of chips, microcomputers, cameras, and telephones into clothing is being studied. A few examples are shown here. The exposition finishes with an assortment of foldable clothes ready to be taken away. Developing the metaphor of deplacement and the properties of transformation, the artist Lucy Orta has realized for this exposition a buoy called "Urban Rescuer-Survival Raft".

Fig.: Stefano Poletti, 1989.
Parure Botanicus en verre de Murano soufflé, laiton et lierre vivant à cultiver.
Coll: Stefano Poletti - Crédits photographiques: Karine Maucotel, Paris Musées 1999.