Fashion and design, an indissoluble union

This article was published on the supplement Design from Vanity Fairon newsstands until 21 June.

Basically, in both cases, envelopes are created within which – hopefully – people feel at ease. Architecture and fashion go hand in hand, so much so that there have been great stylists who were architects, from Gianfranco Ferré to Virgil Abloh: «Fashion design and Architectural Design are refined expressions of human creativity. Architecture and fashion have nothing to do with utility – living or dressing – but with investigating an immaterial universe, made up of emotions and the very meaning of things “. Alessandro Cecchini (in the picture) founder and CEO of YACademyamong the courses of his school he also organized one entitled Architecture for Fashion. Subtitle: designing the space to materialize the brand: «The course seeks to return and codify the experience of the most illustrious authors and architects who have measured themselves against the needs and specificities of the fashion world. From the organization of a showcase, to the design of a store, up to the lighting of the product, passing through art and communication. The testimonies of the great authors overlap with this structure: David Chipperfield for Valentino, Italo Rota for Cavalli, Claudio Silvestrin for Armani, Duccio Grassi for Max Mara, Oma for Prada. All these notions and inspirations are then applied in a design laboratory where, under the tutorship of David Chipperfield Architects, students have the opportunity to produce a pop-up store project for 10 Corso Como ».

As we know, showrooms, exhibitions and factories of the great fashion brands are often exemplary from an architectural point of view: «Let’s think of the experimentation conducted by Prada, which I believe is one of the most complete and compelling. Seoul’s Prada Transformer is an outdated intervention (2009), but which in an intelligent and disruptive way – as Rem Koolhaas knows how to do – introduced the concept of temporality and functional fluidity into the architectural space. Then the experience of the epicenters and above all of the Prada Foundation, in Milan: a magnificent place, which gives the city an abandoned industrial archeology as a container of art. All this, again, according to the sobriety and beauty never cried out by Prada, where a “brushstroke” of gold – we are talking about the Foundation – is enough to be chic and transform an old distillery into one of the most iconic and celebrated architectural interventions of the contemporaneity “.

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