Good Art, Bad Art…

Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan premiered his Spring/Summer 2007 collection this week, and it’s full of Swarovski-crystal-embellished animatronic couture. The clothes wriggle, unfold, collapse, and transform by themselves. The final act in Chalayan’s show, at left: this piece began as a dress, morphed into a hat, then rained down as a cloud of Swarovski crystal dust. Hot.

This was fashion addressing the subject of fashion, a dissection of our contemporary habit of recycling "vintage," and an embrace of high technology, all at the same time. It wasn’t just the uncanny sight of the self-undressing clothes (tech-genius courtesy of the team who made the hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) that provided the chills. That would have left it at the level of childlike entertainment. What really gave the show a disturbing sense of wake-up-to-reality was the soundtrack. Here, the changing shapes were connected to the sounds of the twentieth century—fragments of music, trench warfare, the ranting of Hitler, aerial bombing, jet engines, the beating of helicopter rotors.