The Sole of Architecture

Over the past weeks, I’ve been writing a lot about the shoes I saw while visiting the Bata in Toronto this past October.  Of course, we are all aware that the presence of fashion in a museum setting is hardly a Canadian phenomenon – the Fall of 2006 will surely go down in the books as one of the best for witnessing fashion on display in some of the United States’ most important museums.  I’ve mentioned the ongoing exhibition, “Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection” at LACMA (open through January 2007) and I know all fashionistas “rejoiced” at the opening of the opening of the Boston MFA’s “Fashion Show” last week, but this week I’d like to draw your attention a show which opens November 19 at the MOCA in downtown Los Angeles.  “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” promises to be one of the more cerebral exhibitions featuring fashion this season. 

According to the museum’s press release, this exhibition attempts to explore the common visual and intellectual principles which reside in both fashion and architecture. The curator suggests that both fashion and architecture start with the human body as source, exploring ideas of space and movement.  Brooke Hodge further conjectures that each serves as outward expressions of personal, political, and cultural identities. She argues that the awareness of space is at the center of both architecture’s and fashion’s production, stating “the structures they create are based on volume, function, proportion, and material.”

In reading the press material related to this exhibition and discussing the show’s thesis with colleagues in both the fashion and museum worlds, I am reminded of a tour through an exhibition at the Museum at FIT I took with Richard Martin, ex-curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, while a graduate student at NYU in the late 1990s.  The show was about shoes – a small show, pairs and singles of shoes were showcased in small vitrines.  The selection was eclectic - pumps, sandals, sneakers - and the designers featured ranged from those of the luxury trade to the more pedestrian.  On this particular day, while walking through the galleries, Richard asked us, his students, to defend the existence of this exhibition.  Why should the space be occupied by this material?  What would justify our time spent viewing these objects?  Was it purely an aesthetic experience?  His final question to us is particularly apropos to this blog and the upcoming exhibition at MOCA – are shoes the most architectural expressions of the fashion phenomenon?

I’ll leave you to ponder these questions over your Thanksgiving dinner and return next week with what I think may be the answers.  In the meantime, if you’re in the LA area, check out MOCA and LACMA and if you are lucky enough to be in Boston, be sure to check out the MFA’s “Fashion Show” – it is truly a unique experience in exhibition of fashion.