Hussein Chalayan- from fashion and back

The Tangent Flows
In 1993, Hussein Chalayan graduated from Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London where his highly inventive graduate collection, The Tangent Flows, caused a sensation. The collection featured decomposed silk dresses that had been covered in iron filings, buried in the ground for months and then exhumed. The collection later featured in the window of the London retailer Browns, and helped to launch Chalayan as a new designer with a reputation for innovation.

Inertia
Speed has become the essence of every area of life. The pace of digital communication, travel and commerce are all charged by speed and achievement is often given merit by the speed through which it is born rather than the essence of what is being produced. The collection was envisaged as a sequence, beginning with the clothes carrying images of car components and body cavities. This was followed by a series of organic forms growing over the clothes to symbolise the natural world, which were then overtaken by aggressive images of broken windscreens. Finally, the body became the ‘event’ of a crash where garments caught in the midst of speed embodied the cause and effect of a crash in one moment, with garments bearing images of wrecked cars and number plates.

Panoramic
The starting point for this collection was provided by a statement by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” At the centre of the presentation was the concept of camouflage in which the individual completely blends with the environment, apparently losing all individuality in the process. This was a comment on how we lose our identities through the parameters created by language and institutions. An important symbol in the presentation was the use of mirrors – models emerged from behind them onto the catwalk, reflected, distorted and multiplied, finally disappearing behind them.

After Words
After Words was inspired by the plight of the refugee and the horror of having to leave one’s home suddenly in times of war. Chalayan took his inspiration from observing how Turkish Cypriots, including members of his own family, were subjected to ethnic cleansing in Cyprus prior to 1974 when the country was divided. The collection explored the idea of how people, when confronted by such an ordeal, want to hide their possessions or to carry them on departure. A living room was created with modernist style chairs and a round coffee table. Within the room, clothes were disguised as chair covers, suitcases as chairs and a table as a skirt.

Temporal Meditations
In this collection, Chalayan proposed to combine past and present through historical migratory routes which have made up his homeland Cyprus, using genetic anthropology as a key in determining these ethnic movements across space and time. The garments can be viewed as an archaeological talisman which morphs past and present, ultimately becoming a frozen fragment of its own archaeological quest. In this exhibition, there is a dress which has prints of history of Cyprus, surrounded by the wallpaper of same prints.

Ambimorphous
The Ambimorphous collection can be interpreted as an imaginary trip through a universe in which a range of concepts such as space, time, power, powerlessness, organic, mechanical, ethnic and modernist all play a part. The show began with a model in a richly embroidered traditional Turkish costume. Other models followed wearing clothes whose ‘ethnic’ details were gradually usurped by the black colour of a long, modernist ‘Western’ coat. Other creations were combinations, such as ‘organic’ versus ‘mechanical’. One dress was made of fabric and leather, in which the wearer’s movements were restricted by the leather elements forming a kind of harness. The show’s finale began with a black dress that changed into the ethnic costume with which the show had started.

Absent Presence
This short film explores the neurosis and paranoia surrounding the issue of terrorism, inspired by the introduction of ‘hard line’ policies on immigration and the resulting suspicion surrounding foreign individuals. Chalayan proposed a scenario depicting how institutions could in the future interrogate individuals. In an experiment, expressed as a narrative, non-British female individuals were invited to donate clothing from which a biologist, played by the actress Tilda Swinton, extracted cells to examine their DNA sequences. A series of animations depicted how these individuals might look and this was later compared to the real individuals who were anonymous until that moment, to see how accurate the predictions were.

Readings
Inspired by the culture of sun worship and the cult of celebrity, the showpiece of the collection consisted of two dresses, a jacket and a hat containing Swarovski crystals and over 200 moving lasers, a technology not previously used by Chalayan. The lasers are held in place by custom-made hinges which move by motors. This trains the lasers first on the crystals before moving away from the body creating a matrix of red laser light. The graphical rays represent the aura of performance, with the light space becoming an alternative form of spectacle.

Before Minus Now
Before Minus Now explored the relationship between mankind, technology and natural forces. The sources of inspiration were intangible phenomena such as gravity, expansion and the weather - forces which cause many different shapes in nature. The exhibited dress in this exhibition is inspired by the way in which mountains are created by centuries of tectonic thrust and erosion. For this, Chalayan used a shapeless bale of tulle that was cut away gradually in order to arrive at a more regular dress shape.

Manifest Destiny
Chalayan is interested in the physical and psychological results of Western expansionism. Strict Western clothing standards can be perceived as a means of imposing such ideologies, which often seek to cover, lace up and deform the body. Chalayan used the collection to explore the meaning of clothes in the developed world and to liberate the body from Western traditions. He designed clothes with the anatomy as the starting point, revealed by the elasticity of the materials used to reveal the body beneath. The final four dresses bore holes cut in different areas representing the organs of the body and coloured strips representing various layers of skin.

Geotropics
Geotropics reflects upon the role of topographical features such as borders and rivers in shaping wars and cultures. Chalayan created a computer animation that morphed together national costumes from different dates and places along the 2,000 year old Silk Road from China to the West. This collection is mainly based on this animation film, which is a journey through time and the Silk Road, with garments morphing into one another. Three dresses in this exhibition show the way of moving from one place to another. The show’s finale was a monumental dress, which was a chair integrated into a garment so that the model and chair appeared to be a single entity.

Repose
Chalayan is fascinated by the concept of flight. He views airports as borders, and the divide in between symbolically representing the divide between his own Turkish Cypriot heritage and his life in London. An aircraft wing protrudes from the wall, with a large flap of the wing moving slowly up and down to reveal a long strip of Swarovski crystals illuminated from behind by LED lights. A single seat folding out from the wall represents passengers sitting outside the aircraft, and is a reaction to the absurdity, excitement and experience of flying, manifesting itself as an out of body experience.

Place to Passage
Place to Passage is a short film conceived and directed by Chalayan collaborating with digital designers, Neutral. The film explores the implications of speed, technology and displacement on our psyche by using a number of metaphors and symbols which hint at the idea of displacement. Chalayan created an imagined journey from London to Istanbul that takes the viewer through raw urban streets to a dreamlike landscape. The speeding pod carries an androgynous female passenger who has created an imaginary living space where temporary refuge, memories of another life, isolation, nostalgia and exploration all merge into one. The pod’s final journey is along the Bosphorus, the river running through the centre of the city of Istanbul which marks the division between Asia and Europe, before finally docking in an underground car park that symbolically marks both the end, and the start, of a new journey.

Blindscape
What is it like to be blind? This was the challenging starting point for the Blindscape collection. Chalayan blindfolded himself and then started to sketch out well known standard items such as jackets and trousers. Subsequently the show presented clothes with wild prints and dramatic scenes showing swirling seas full of fierce monsters symbolizing a nightmare. Finally, entering calm water, the show ended with clothes that had prints of tranquil seas with garments made entirely of blue beads. This installation, specially created by Chalayan for the Atrium at MOT, also references his early childhood, presenting the Mediterranean atmosphere of Northern Cyprus.

Airborne
Our culture has established a world view where death is seen as an opposite force to life. Using world climates as a metaphor, this collection reflects upon our sense of empowerment and our fears of mortality linked to weather cycles. The climates constantly renew and recreate all entities in the world, including our bodies, demonstrating that the life and death of all life forms are in a constant state of flux. The project was presented in four parts - Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Spring and Summer each featured an extraordinary LED dress consisting of 15,600 LEDS combined with crystal displays.