REVIEW: “Fabricating Fashion” at the Art Institute of Chicago

Installation view. Image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

REVIEW
Fabricating Fashion
Aug. 20 – Jan. 2, 2023
Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave,
Chicago, IL 60603

By Kristin Mariani

Two weeks ago, the internet exploded with videos from the Coperni catwalk of Bella Hadid being sprayed with a white, unidentified flying material, rapidly drying in runway time to the conforms of her idealized figure. This new modality of dress, applied as easily as a spray-on tan, formed a peelable, prefigurative layer with a substance called Fabrican. The internet audience went wild, affirming what the company referred to as “a new era in twenty-first century mass customization.” Within minutes this material, based in silly putty technology, formed a beautiful new bodily surface: a white, wispy, crisp edged, seamless slip dress. Fast fashion shows no signs of slowing down.

This well-timed event during Paris Fashion week coincides with my entrance to AIC's Fabricating Fashion exhibit. Two mannequins on display greet me wearing white, wispy, crisp edged layers of translucent cotton. One, a woman’s day dress from France, the other, a man’s Angarkha from India — both made circa 1800 — establish less distinction in gender than the exhibit labels provide, and less distinction between the lines of what is a dress tradition and what is fashion. 

Defining fashion is a point of discussion as I walk through the exhibit with Melinda Watt, AIC Textiles Department Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator. We begin our walkthrough with a common understanding of what fashion has historically striven to do: create a modality of dress for individual people to move through the world. Displayed alongside the two white gauzy figures are two lengths of cloth. The first from late 1800’s Manchu, China, a velvet fabric whose woven surface outlines the piecework for a woman’s Ao or Magua, runs parallel to the exhibit floor. The second, an 18th century man’s sash from Iran or possibly Poland, hangs perpendicular to it. This arrangement of objects establishes the global intersection that is the fundamental structure of woven cloth: the warp and the weft.

The relationship between cloth and people runs threadlike through the exhibit. A proper reading of this exhibit requires some understanding of the flat-to-form loop that rotates fashion forward. Many of the pattern configurations in cloth call on the viewer to solve a sewing puzzle. The economy of layout is a logic particularly familiar to dressmakers, and perhaps one not so familiar to a general museum audience. What is apparently common to the audience is a desire to touch these textiles. Watt’s installation decisions were made under guidance from AIC Textiles Associate Conservator, Isaac Facio, and Assistant Conservator, Megan Creamer. Careful consideration was made to install works just beyond arm’s reach, with few works displayed under glass, to optimize tactility from a safe distance. Given how frequently the exhibit alarms sound, it becomes clear that viewers are drawn to unintentionally test the boundaries and take a closer look at the fabrics. The directness of the displayed works, many of which are hung over dowels rather than framed, heightens the sense of a hand present in the materials.

Installation view. Image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

What is less tangible in the exhibit is how these fabrics were fashioned around a human figure. While the AIC Textiles department does not actively collect articles of dress, a number of garments have been acquisitioned through donations. Cloth’s configuration into wearable garments is displayed intermittently, and in subtle detail. Tails of loose threads provide evidence of cloth edges joined together to form a garment. An embroidered French blue fragment of a silk flounce mimics the larger form of a woman’s bell-shaped skirt. The creases of another skirt panel, whose waist gathers have been released, hold memory of its fuller volumes. An embroidered collar ornamenting a neckline suggests the radiance of the face surrounded by its adornment.

The human connection to cloth is very much alive with AIC’s exhibit guard Barbara Webster engaging audience members as they walk through Fabricating Fashion. As much docent as exhibit guard, Webster’s knowledge as a steward of the works under her domain shapes audience experience and brings voice to the cloth. Webster is intimate with the textiles in her midst, protecting the boundaries, a presence that settles the regular interval of alarms. Watt expressed that Webster’s expertise provides invaluable insight into her curatorial process. 

Expanses of fabric and their figurative relationships continue as one progresses through the galleries. Customization commences with cloth, as exhibit focus shifts to bespoke fabrics. Dominating a north wall hangs a larger than life silk panel ornamented with graphic constellations of embroidered roundels commissioned for an empress’s Gunfu. Standing next to this cloth is a Huipil for a married woman with embroidered motifs along the neckline and shoulders representing the sun and the moon. Woven with a backstrap loom in earthy hues of cotton, the making of this cloth was imbued with a life force binding the wearer to the weaver, whose angled back in a seated position completed the framework of the loom, creating the physical tension to cross the natural cotton fibers of the warp with the weft. This cloth was made for this specific garment to be worn by a specific woman. The joined edges confirm the spiritual value in the act of weaving, with no cuts or material waste made. Research by Mellon Undergraduate Fellow Denise Gonzalez revealed that the natural earthen tones of the filament were created from indigenous cotton plants now extinct, making plain that cotton was not always a naturally white fiber. This uncut garment is a precursor to the last gallery of Fabricating Fashion.

Installation view. Image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the last gallery, Watt shares her intentions behind the abstract display of the area’s theme of uncut cloth, which seeks to suspend the woven works somewhere between how they exist as a woven textile, and the orientation of drape as it hangs on a human being. This exhibit concludes by demonstrating that fabric is not flat. It is a responsive 3D structure – responsive to the body of the wearer whether woven 1,000 years ago or sprayed from a robotic nozzle today. Watt emphasizes that the lengths of fabric in the textile department’s archive far surpass the reaches of their exhibition footprint in the AIC museum basement. The storage conditions of cloth are relevant to the footprint of this underground exhibit. Cloth moves mole-like through the world. Its transport and storage rely on its rolled and tunneled forms, surfaces under wraps, one layer covering the next. Fabric takes on many disguises in the fashioning of people’s physical forms, connecting cultural changes in its gridded structures across the world. Our clothed bodies’ long history with the woven rectangle, and its elevation by the embellishment or engineering of a stitch, trace and enhance cloth’s travel around a body’s circumference. The lengths of cloth in Fabricating Fashion span global history over the last 200 years, stretching far beyond the reach of today’s runways.

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