Hussein Chalayan’s fascination with architecture, spatial dynamics, urban identity, and aerodynamics is expressed in garments based on concepts, technological systems, historical dress, and theories of the body. His clothes are minimal in look but maximal in thought.
Early Career
Chalayan was born in the Turkish community of Nicosia on the island of Cyprus in 1970. His parents separated when he was a child. At the age of eight, he joined his father, who had moved to the United Kingdom. Chalayan was sent to a private school in London when he was twelve, but returned to Cyprus to study for his Alevel examinations. He went back to London and attended Central Saint Martin’s College at the age of nineteen to study fashion. Chalayan rose to fashion fame soon after he received his B.A. degree from Central Saint Martin’s in 1993. His graduating collection, titled The Tangent Flows, was the now infamous series of buried garments that were exhumed just before the show and presented with a text that explained the process.
The rituals of burial and resurrection gave the garments a dimension of reference to life, death, and urban decay in a process that transported the garments from the world of fashion to the kingdom of nature. Since then, Chalayan has collaborated with architects, artists, textile technologists and aerospace engineers; has won awards; and has been recognized as an artist in numerous museum presentations of his work.
The genius of Chalayan’s work lies in his ability to explore visual and intellectual principles that chart the spectral orientations of urban societies through such tangibles as clothing, buildings, vehicles, and furniture and through such abstractions as beauty, philosophy and feeling. Chalayan’s Aeroplane and Kite dresses (autumn-winter 1995) used the spatial relationship between the fabric and the body to reflect the relative meanings of speed and gravity. The dresses became dynamic interfaces between the human body and its surroundings; the Kite dress actually flew and was reunited with its wearer when it returned to earth.
A model steps into a Hussein Chalayan skirt. Chalayan incorporated a relation to architecture, geometry, and urban life into his designs. He launched his career in 1993 with a collection titled "The Tangent Flows," in which the garments had been buried and exhumed before the show, which depicted the process of life and death.
In Chalayan’s eyes, all garments are externalizations of the body in the same way that vehicles and buildings are proportioned to contain the human form. “Everything around us either relates to the body or to the environment,” Chalayan explained. “I think of modular systems where clothes are like small parts of an interior, the interiors are part of architecture, which is then a part of an urban environment. I think of fluid space where they are all a part of each other, just in different scales and proportions” (Quinn, p. 120). These sentiments were amplified in the Echoform collection (autumn-winter 1999) in dresses that mimicked airplane interiors. Chalayan attached padded headrests to the shoulders of the garments, evoking thoughts on the role of clothing as a component of a larger spatial system.
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