Architectural Fashion

Fashion Architecture Taste or FAT is an art-architecture collaborative from the Netherlands that works out of London, England. They have been described as "very young" and "very controversial" and have a cult following that has "brought work in the ultra-cool Netherlands," success on the international lecture and exhibition circuit, and an expanding
body of completed work. Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob are the main members of the group. Summary from Wikipedia.

History

The group formed in London in the 1990s and challenged the "orthodoxy of Modernist good taste", first with experimentalism in their Anti-Oedipal House (1993) that separated children and parents, and then at the 1995 Venice Biennale by distributing art from vending machines. They did a similar effort later in London's Carnaby Street on shopping bags (1999), and converted an Amsterdam church into the Kessels Kramer Advertising Office in 1998 with big
playground furniture, a fort, fake diving board, and lifeguard shack.

The group operated on a limited budget with their early projects and acts as a collective that is anti-hierarchical.They have been influenced by Robert Venturi, Situationists, Mannerism, the Arts and Crafts movement, Archigram, and Jeff Koons. They "steal copy, collage and make overt references to all kinds of high and low architecture; reusing, rescaling, recolouring; remaking their sources in the wrong materials," with their first projects being redesigns of interiors such as the Brunel Rooms nightclub in Swindon (1995) where a running tack, swimming pool, garden shed and lounge were added. One of Fat's director's, Sean Griffiths, built a house in baby blue with cutout wall shapes and artful references to Edwin Lutyens, Adolf Loos, and Robert Venturi. Summary from Wikipedia.


What is Architectural Fashion?

• Fabrics as a building materials, creating both hard and round lines for designer clothes.
• Oversize proportions, exaggerated angles and swooshy layers.
• Strong silhouettes with emphasis on structure, shape and form.
• Major pleats, folds, pinning, layering, surface texture and three-dimensional designs.

The New Guard

• The 27-year-old avant-garde designer Gareth Pugh presented a collection of armorlike outfits “a modern warrior,” he called the aesthetic — bringing engineered clothing to new heights.
• The current Ferré designers, Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi, are carrying the label’s lineage into the future, with “the introduction of new, more fluid fabrics that enable the hard architectural shapes to become softer and more feminine.”
• The Swedish designer Sandra Backlund doesn’t look at architecture for direct inspiration, but admits, “I am very fascinated by all the ways you can highlight, distort and transform the natural silhouette with clothes and accessories.” Yet Ralph Lauren doesn't have any collection of the clothing line.