Cubism and Modernity

Cubism and the concept of engineered folding inspire seaming and the construction of experimental form. Objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form- instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the designs will be depicted from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. The surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. Strong masculine and feminine looks contrast to great effect. Masculine dandy tailored looks are softened by a feminine cut and fluid cloth for a relaxed elegance.

Mimi Smith_ Maternity Dress, 1966

Smith is an American artist whose work engages overtly with feminism. Much of her art takes the form of clothing which both protects and politicises the female body. In this work, a plastic observation window recycled from an old washing machine marks the space of pregnancy.

Isabel Toledo_Packing Dress, S/S_1988_Baseball collection

Toledo, a New York -based fashion designer, designed this dress so that the view from the front is the inverse of the view from the back. The dress packs flat like a poncho, its billowy folds settling into a perfect circle with elliptical neck and arm holes, and a circular hole at the hem.

As Robert Rosenblum has described of the first generation of cubism in the fine arts, “for all the seeming solidity of this new world of building blocks, there is something strangely unstable and shifting in its appearance. The ostensible cubes of Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque were to evolve into a pictorial language that rapidly discarded this preliminary reference to solid geometry and turned rather to a further exploration of an ever more ambiguous and fluctuating world.”

Antliff, M., and Leighten, P., 2001, Cubism and culture, Chapter 2: Philosophies of time and space, and Chapter 4: Gender codes, Thames & Hudson world of art, New York, pp.64-111,136-159.

Fashion and Art, http://tirocchi.stg.brown.edu/514/story/fashion_art.html. Accessed on 16th April 2010.

Smith, R. 1998, Design review, A fashion Statement Draped in Cubism.