In their fall collections, many designers experimented with proportions to create new shapes. Perfect timing, it would seem, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s newest exhibition “Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion From the Permanent Collection.”
Curated by LACMA’s Costume and Textiles Department senior curator and department head Sharon S. Takeda and curator Kaye D. Spilker, the show examines the evolution of shapes and surfaces of fashion during the past 25 years, and explores how designers during the Eighties and Nineties challenged and redefined Fifties’ fashion techniques.
“Construction techniques and materials have changed quite a bit since the Eighties,” Spilker said. “Things that were radical back in 1980 are quite commonplace today, and many of the pieces in the exhibit show this.”
The exhibit, which runs from Sept. 17 to Jan. 7, culls from the museum’s permanent fashion collection and the 130 pieces on show feature about 40 designers, including works from Jean Paul Gaultier, Martin Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto, Azzedine Alaïa, Hussein Chalayan, Christian Lacroix, Hervé Léger and Alexander McQueen.
To underscore just how much garment construction and surface textures have altered, many of the looks will be juxtaposed with vintage pieces by legendary designers such as Charles James, Gilbert Adrian and Christian Dior. For instance, Issey Miyake’s pleated plissé pieces are displayed with Mariano Fortuny Delphos dresses, made between 1907 and 1940, or a deconstructed Martin Margiela jacket is set against a Christian Dior suit from the Fifties replete with boning and padding.
Then there are designers who reference the past, such as Vivienne Westwood in her Eighties Mini-Crini collection, or Christopher Bailey’s cropped trenchcoat for a 2003 Burberry collection, which loosely resembles World War I officer coats. The show also aims to highlight how much innovation in fabrics has contributed to changes in fashion. Where once the construction would give a body shape, the reverse is now often the case, and designers use innovative fabrics to make their statements, such as Issey Miyake who created a dress made from heat-set pleated polyester in the mid-Nineties.
“Designers are not just making pretty things,” Takeda said. “They have ideas and have learned to create the very inventive forms.”