Anthony L. Marasco

THE UNWEARABLES

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I am curious about unwearable fashion garments. Why would anyone want to make a dress that is not meant to be worn? What is it for? Take the assemblage of Membrane Tees layered on a mannequin we saw last night at the opening of Rick Owens's Triennale show "Subhuman, Inhuman, Superhuman." (From Dec. 15, 2017 to March 25, 2018). What's the point of making such a garment? I am not sure the first answer that comes to mind is the right one: Obviously, these unwearable designs are meant to shock and attract attention precisely because they are unwearable. There is some of that, of course. But does it end there? Perhaps a short genealogy of unwearable fashion garment is in order. 

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THE UNWEARABLES

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The type of unwearable garments I have in mind were born with what is known as 'conceptual fashion.' Unwearable garments existed before, granted. Coronation robes were borderline unwearable, and many other ceremonial dresses could only be worn with constant assistance, and for a very limited period of time. It was with the arrival in the West of the Japanese 'Shock Wave' that the type unwearables I am interested about gained momentum. It all started in the early 1980s with the debut in Paris of Kenzo, Yoshi Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons, that is, Rei Kawakubo. Of the four, the only one that should interest here is Kawakubo. Kenzo never deviated from bringing to market exquisite apparel. Yamamoto never intended to place and lasting equity on shock, and was shocking only to the extent that the new is shocking at first. Miyake never intended his sculptural garments to be unwearable, actually he entirely refashioned the wardrobe to make clothes more wearable. All of them gave fashion a conceptual turn, but only Kawakubo took her fashion all the way into the purely conceptual: the unwearable. 

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THE UNWEARABLES

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Some objects of art are meant to open our eyes. Others are there to divert your gaze from the visual to the conceptual. Marcel Duchamp called this approach ‘anti-retinal.’ He made ‘conceptual art’ that one had to ponder over rather than perceive. In this, his approach had something to do with the art of the Baroque, a type of visual representation that wanted the viewer to close her eyes to see the truth. Blinded by the vertiginous light emanating by God, the ecstatic viewer finally understood that ultimate reality is beyond the senses. It can't be seen with one's eyes, but one must open the mind’s eye to ‘see’ it. Like anti-retinal art, unwearable fashion pushes the concept beyond the garment. But why? What is it to be gained by fashioning garments that go beyond the wearable?

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THE UNWEARABLES

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Why would anyone make a dress that is not meant to be worn? Being curious about unwearable fashion garments, I launched a brief genealogy of conceptual garments only to realize that just a handful of garments, and even fewer designers, had fallen into the habit of designing clothes that programmatically couldn’t be worn. Too few to be turned into a significant category. And yet, since I could not let it rest that these clothes were only made for show, I still felt the need to name their peculiar value in the general economy of the fashionable. What was the meaning of clothes that did not let you do much other than wear them? 


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THE UNWEARABLES

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Barbara Trebitsch gave me a hint as to what type of categorical mistake I had made. While standing in line at the Triennale for the opening of "Subhuman, Inhuman, Superhuman," Rick Owens’s show, I thought I would say something relevant by making a point that I was writing on unwearable garments. “Nothing is unwearable, you know, Anthony,” she replied softly. “I know,” I said, laboring to refine my statement. But I couldn’t. I really didn’t know, for I had not spent a life in fashion as she had. She knew from experience what unwearables did when they were actually worn. 


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THE UNWEARABLES

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What Barbara was alluding to went in the general direction of what Michel Foucault called the ‘limit experience.’ Seemingly unwearable garments are fashioned to test the resilience of the boundaries that (help) constitute the self. This is true of both conceptual fashion and what I had called ‘unwearables.’ There is no categorical divide between the two: One is the extreme form of the other. And yet, this said, the question I had initially posed returned: What was to be gained conceptually by wearing what could not be worn for any purpose other than wearing it? An answer came later that evening when, in another city, I sat down to read the literature curator Eleonora Fiorani had so kindly handed us entering the show at the Triennale.

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THE UNWEARABLES

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Why would anyone make a dress that is not meant to be worn? The answer I had been looking for was right there under my nose, and I didn't see it. More exactly, it had mostly gone over my head. As we walked through Rick Owens’s show “Subhuman, Inhuman, Superhuman” something we first saw on the floor by the entrance now triumphantly bowelled above our heads. After passing through a towering, narrow door to enter into a pitch-black room, the dark formless matter you had seen on the floor by entrance swung up toward the ceiling forming a long, winding blob of unequivocal shape. So it didn’t surprise me to read in the show’s literature that Owens’s earliest aesthetic concern, 20 years ago, had been to “lay a black glittering turd on the white landscape of conformity." 20 years later, we got to see the laying of the capacious excretion in reverse. 

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THE UNWEARABLES

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Owens’s aesthetic program is a tad disingenuous because it was Freud who notoriously linked creativity to the anal stage, the moment in our development when we feel triumphant for having finally conquered the movement of the bowels. Through the anus, we are put in command of our existence. Freud aside, what caught my attention was the type of relation Owens saw between his fecal creativity and conformity. I had not yet seen at that point "Items: Is Fashion Modern?" the groundbreaking show Paola Antonelli put up at the MoMA with the assistance of Michelle Millar Fisher (October 1, 2017--January 28, 2018.) The show assembled the most noticeable garments and accessories that made our wardrobe 'modern.' Had the show not actually included Kawakubo and Owens, it would have been exactly what these two designers revolted against. Not only did they want to the change the dominant fashion silhouette. They wanted to challenge the very foundations of the fashion discourse, wearability being its most fundamental. 
Rick Owens // Another Magazine
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THE UNWEARABLES

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When a fashion editor for The Guardian, Susannah Frankel, asked Rei Kawakubo to explain the meaning of Comme des Garçons’s seemingly unwearable collection she presented as “Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body” in 1996, the Japanese designer drew a circle on a scrap of paper and left. That was her answer, and as it happens, it was also the answer I was looking for when I wondered why would anyone make a dress that is not meant to be worn. Skewing wearability, conceptual designers like Kawakubo and Owens level to the ground on which the Modern wardrobe was built. This act of erasure allowed what they understood as the archetypes of fashion to come more fully to light. If in the Christian West the most abiding archetype remains the distinction between the conscious and the subconscious mind (reminiscent as the distinction was of the divide between the Passions and the Will typical of classic Antiquity), in the Buddhist East, the most prominent archetype is Mu, or the void, symbolized in Zen calligraphy with a flowing circle. In the void, in the conscious and subconscious mind are reconciled becoming one. A ready mind is an empty mind. If Owens’s erasure of wearability brings to the surface the subconscious creative energy conformity repressed, Kawakubo’s erasure points to the primacy of the void in the act of creation. In both cases, the erasure of wearability has led to an evocation of the archetypal foundations of the fashion discourse. 

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THE UNWEARABLES

Anthony L. Marasco

The Unwearables
by Anthony Louis Marasco

RICK OWENS
------
SUBHUMAN
INHUMAN
SUPERHUMAN

15 DEC 2017 - 25 MAR 2018

La Triennale di Milano




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