Remote Control dress

Hussein ChalayanSpring/Summer 2000FASHION / Work

A dress whose shape is changed by a mechanism, not by the body wearing it.

A rigid pale pink sleeveless dress on a headless form against grey, its two side flaps swung out from the hips like wings, with seam lines and small panels visible across the bodice. — The Met's edition with the side flaps open, showing the full silhouette in its altered state.
PHOTOGRAPH The Metropolitan Museum of Art / metmuseum.orgReferenced from its source. Rights not established by SIMULACRA.

Plates 3

Overview

A dress by Hussein Chalayan, first shown in his Spring/Summer 2000 collection, Before Minus Now. It is a rigid shell of fibreglass and resin cast in a purpose-made mould, with side and rear flaps that open to reveal a mass of pink tulle. In the original, the Met says, the flaps were operated mechanically by remote control.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an edition of one, made in 2005 and bought in 2006 (2006.251a–c). Its record lists three parts: two in fibreglass and metal, one in cotton and synthetic. On this edition the flaps are moved by hand. The museum object keeps the mechanism's form without its remote control.

What to notice

01A shell, not clothThe dress is cast, so it holds its own shape off the body. It drapes nothing. What moves is the hardware.
02The seams are hingesIn profile you can see the vertical line and clasps where the flaps part from the skirt. They read as panel joints on a vehicle more than as dressmaking.
03Soft inside hardOpening the flaps releases pink tulle, the softest material in dress, from the hardest. The silhouette changes from a closed cone to something winged.
04The wearer is not in chargeIn the Echoform dress the model pressed the switch. Here the control was remote, so the change happened to the wearer rather than being done by her.

Historical context

Chalayan, born in Cyprus in 1970, called three dresses from consecutive collections 'monuments to ideas', a phrase the Met quotes. Zoot and Irenebrination list them: a resin chair-like dress from Geotropics (Spring/Summer 1999), an aeroplane dress from Echoform (Autumn/Winter 1999–2000) whose flaps moved at a switch worked by the model, and this one, where the control left the body entirely.

The Met describes the remote-control piece as a permutation of those two earlier models, exploring the relation between nature, culture and technology. Chalayan returned to the idea in later work, such as a remote-controlled Floating Dress in fibreglass and polyester resin made with Swarovski for Autumn/Winter 2011.

Connections

Formal resemblance

silhouette as a variable ↔ with
Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons
Kawakubo's pads and Chalayan's flaps both make the outline of a dress something other than the outline of the body. Kawakubo does it with soft padding; Chalayan does it with a hinge.
Sourcesmetmuseum.org
machinery acting on the body ↔ with
Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg
Both imagine equipment that works on a person in front of an audience. Cronenberg's is organic and surgical; Chalayan's is clean, fibreglass and remote.

Personal association

a body rearranged ↔ with
Body without Organs, Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari
The archive uses Body without Organs as a lens for garments that reorganise a body. This dress is a direct case: the figure changes while the wearer does nothing. The link is this archive's reading, not Chalayan's.