Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology by Metropolitan Museum of Art (review)

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257-263 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2017.

1 Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology by Metropolitan Museum of Art (review) Julie Wosk Technology and Culture, Volume 58, Number 1, January 2017, pp (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (15 Jul :49 GMT)

2 E X H I B I T R E V I E W Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York J U L I E W O S K In its riveting exhibit Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, New York s Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a feast for the eyes. On view from 5 May to 5 September 2016, it featured dramatically contrasting fashions: exquisite, custom-made haute couture dresses delicately hand embroidered and encrusted with sequins and crystals displayed right next to today s designs created using the latest in technological processes and materials, including 3-D printing and ultrasonic welding. There were innovative dresses ornamented with laser-cut silicone strips and even a remote-controlled dress that spread its metal-plated skirt open, adding a kinetic component to its design. The show s title, Manus x Machina, referred to fashions made by hand and by machine, and the x in the title, explained the exhibit s curator Andrew Bolton, is a multiplication symbol signifying that the hand and the machine are not oppositional but equal and mutual protagonists in solving design problems. Bolton s show s title, as explained in his exhibit catalog essay, was inspired by the epigraph in German director Fritz Lang s 1927 film Metropolis: THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART. Given Lang s dystopian vision of technology, said Bolton, the epigraph could quite easily have been rephrased, The Mediator between the HAND and the MACHINE must be the HEART. Though handmade and machine-made were in an oppositional relationship starting with the Industrial Revolution, in today s world of fashion there is more often a type of hybridity, so that both the hand and the machine are Dr. Julie Wosk is professor of art history, English, and studio painting at the State University of New York, Maritime College in New York City. Her books include My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves; Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age; and Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. She has also written numerous articles on technology, gender, art, and design by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved X/17/ /

3 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2017 VOL. 58 rarely absent from the act of fashion creation. Together, they help create fashions of exceptional originality and outstanding technical ingenuity. 1 The exhibit brought together haute couture designs often elaborate fashions specifically tailored for a particular body and produced in limited quantities and prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) fashions produced in standardized sizes in greater quantities. The exhibit s catalog and wall labels argued that with the rise of mechanization and industrial production methods, manufacturers in the late nineteenth century were mass-producing prêt-à-porter clothing. In the face of modern technological developments, however, haute couture fashion houses maintained their stature by continuing to use hand skills for embellishment and finishing. Still, as Bolton points out, the official designation haute couture in France coincided with the development of the sewing machine in the nineteenth century, and haute couture fashion houses that needed to produce large quantities of clothing for both women and men often utilized sewing machines for economy and efficiency. What made this exhibit so fascinating, however, was not the story it told almost in passing about production methods but the astonishing aura it created. It was masterfully designed to evoke a quasireligious experience, as though ushering the visitor into a fashion house of worship for the digital age. The air was filled with the soaring strains of Brian Eno s electronic music (sardonically entitled Music for Airports ), which could be overheard throughout the galleries, and overhead was a high domed ceiling complete with a circular skylight resembling an oculus in Roman temples or Byzantine architecture. The highlight of the show was seen immediately on entry through an arched doorway: a regal, cream-colored wedding ensemble designed in by Karl Lagerfeld for the House of Chanel with an astonishing twenty-foot train made of satin and scuba knit (a synthetic fabric resembling neoprene). Its train and decorative medallion were opulently handembroidered with glass and pearls, and machine-printed with rhinestones, and the dress s train pattern was electronically projected onto the domed ceiling above the dress. Speaking in hushed voices, visitors bent down to look at the decoration closely as though they were examining an icon. Most of the other 170 fashions in the exhibit were a product of both hand and machine, although there were also extreme exceptions. A prêt-àporter dress by British designer Thom Browne was entirely machine made, its uninspiring shape ornamented with cutout patterns that looked like Pennsylvania Dutch stencils. Intended to look like leather, the dress was fabricated from EVA foam cut by machine, sewn by machine, and finished by machine. 1. Andrew Bolton, Manus x Machina, 9, 12, 13 (all interview quotations in the review from this source). For more on Metropolis, see Julie Wosk s articles, On the Cover: Metropolis and Update on the Film Metropolis. 258

4 WOSKK KManus x Machina At the other end of the spectrum was a House of Chanel haute couture wedding ensemble by Karl Lagerfeld made by hand from start to finish. It was trimmed with white ostrich feathers at the neck, sleeves, and base and covered with 2,500 artificial white fabric camellias created and embroidered with sequins by workers in two French ateliers (each flower took ninety minutes to create, and together with the embroidery and featherwork the dress required 700 hours of labor). The organizing principle of the exhibit was based on the trades or métiers of dressmaking detailed in Denis Diderot s Encyclopédie published between 1751 and The circular galleries were divided into sections focusing on the work of petites mains or little hands in workshops: embroidery, artificial flowers, featherwork, lacemaking, and pleating. The galleries of the Robert Lehman Wing on the museum s first floor displayed embroidery, artificial flowers, and featherwork, while the lower-level galleries featured pleating, leatherwork, lacemaking, and also toiles and paper patterns (fashion prototypes) used to create haute couture fashions. In glass cases were open pages of the original Encyclopédie showing illustrations of workers and tools, including male tailors working on suits, women working at lacemaking and embroidery, men and women fabricating artificial flowers. The subtitle of the exhibit was Fashion in an Age of Technology, and in the darkened galleries there were dramatic examples of high-tech fashions. In the 2004 remake of the Hollywood film The Stepford Wives, the husbands use remote controls to activate their sexy and compliant robot wives. In the Met Museum exhibit, the Cyprus-born British designer Hussein Chalayan also used a remote control to activate his 2007 prototype One Hundred and Eleven mechanical dress created using digitally printed cotton/metal plates ornamented with Swarovski crystals (the title refers to Swarovski s 111th anniversary as a company). Ecstatic audiences at the Paris Fashion Show in 2007 clapped when an electronic wand or remote control was used to peel open the Chalayan dress like a flower and raise the skirt in a balloon-like shape (it can be seen in motion on You Tube). The designer has noted, though, that his real focus was not technological: the dress was inspired by world events wars, revolutions, and other social and political upheavals that have shaped the fashion world over the course of a century. Much more playful and fun was Chalayan s 2007 Video Dress, hand-wired and ornamented with 15,600 flashing LED lights. Some of the exhibit s most arresting designs using industrial materials and today s digital technologies were by Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, whose clothing included a white haute couture ensemble (2010) with a sculptural 3-D printed bodice made of polyamide (fig. 1). Van Herpen often collaborates with engineers, architects, artists, and scientists, and in an interview with Andrew Bolton she commented: I work with technol- EXHIBIT REVIEW 259

5 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2017 VOL. 58 FIG. 1 Ensemble, Iris van Herpen (Dutch, born 1984), spring/summer 2010 haute couture (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2015 ( a, b). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo Nicholas Alan Cope.) ogy but the hand and machine are equal in my design process they are totally integrated. She is known for her use of 3-D printing, which she likes because it permits extraordinary detailing, and she notes that polyamide, also used in automotive design, is strong and durable. What I noticed in the exhibit is that designers like van Herpen tend to unite the technological with the organic or biological world. Her haute couture dress was created with strips of laser-cut nude silicone feathers and has silicone-covered gull skulls. An autumnal dress was entirely made of orange polymer leaf shapes that were 3-D printed using stereolithography and also hand-sanded and sprayed with a transparent 260

6 WOSKK KManus x Machina resin (I overheard a ten-year-old girl telling her parents, I love it! I want it! and describing it as an autumn leaf tutu ). Both eerie and arresting, van Herpen s 3-D printed prêt-à-porter Skeleton dress made of white polyamide, developed with the architect Isaïe Bloch, looks almost entirely like overlapping bones. The dress took over two months of intense drawing and a week for the printing. Van Herpen apparently liked the fact that the technologically created dress was imprecise. People often think that when you create something by machine it is perfect. But she points out that there were many small faults in the printing because of the intense heating of the material, and she liked the fact that the bones look irregular because that makes it look even more real. Although many of today s designers have embraced new technology, there are also signs of ambivalence in the show. In his catalog interview with van Herpen, Bolton mentions that in the history of fashion, there are many examples of anxiety, even terror, surrounding technology, despite the fact that fashion and technology are inextricably connected. Revealing this anxiety, one of Chalayan s dresses from his spring/summer 2009 Inertia ready-to-wear collection is fabricated from jersey ultrasonically welded (or thermobonded) to neoprene, hand-painted, and airbrushed with gray, green blue, brown, black, and red imagery taken from photographs of the remnants of car crashes fenders, car handles found in automobile graveyards. Said the designer, we live in a world caught up in speed and fast-paced living, and the dresses represent the body being the cause and effect of a crash in one moment. But though the dress s imagery depicts technological hazards, its sweeping lines also suggest the optimistic modernity and aerodynamic lines of America s tail-finned automobiles of the 1950s. Also more optimistic is Chalayan s Kaikoku Floating dress with its cast-gold-colored shape covered with small paper pollens that fly away when radio controlled with a digital handset. These butterfly-like flying pollens suggest the playful potential for new organic growth and creativity. EXHIBIT REVIEW Some Questions That Still Need Answering Manus x Machina was an exciting exhibit, but for one that focused so heavily on women s clothes, there were surprisingly few references to the gendering of the fashions. Occasionally a card might mention that the softly shouldered and delicately embroidered 1953 haute couture Christian Dior May dress was created in the post World War II period when women wanted a more feminine look and to turn away from the boxy look of military uniforms worn by women-soldiers (presumably a reference to the army s WACs [Women s Army Corps], the navy s WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service], and WASPs [Women 261

7 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JANUARY 2017 VOL. 58 Airforce Service Pilots]). But what do the fashions reveal about issues of femininity, as socially defined and how have cultural definitions of feminine fashions shifted and changed? For example, to what degree has elaborate ornamentation periodically been considered essential to create a feminine look? To what extent have designers shaped mechanistic-looking designs, metallic fabrics, and robotic-looking fashions to the female form? Another issue to wonder about is the historic role and present practice of female and male laborers in the production and manufacture of the elaborately ornamented haute couture fashions as well as the industrial manufacture of ready-made clothes. One of the stories heard little about in the exhibit is that of the workers who produced the elaborate haute couture embroidery, featherwork, and artificial flowers. These workers, called paruriers in France (ornament makers), have engaged in work that has, the exhibit argues, remained surprisingly unchanged for centuries. In factories and ateliers, were they mostly women or men? Were they underpaid, as were women working in nineteenth-century France and Switzerland where so much hand-embroidery was often done? What was the technological and social impact of lace-making machines that were introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like the Schiffli embroidery machine and the Raschel knitting machine? Were men assigned to these machines, as they were with jacquard looms? More recently, who has been employed in the French ateliers that produced fashions like Saint Laurent s 1983 hand-embroidered Sardine dress, which, we are told, took 1,500 hours to complete? Though Paris remains the center for specialized embroidery, increasingly India is becoming an important source of skilled artisans who also create handmade artificial flowers and featherwork. Can we learn more about their work conditions and the gendering of their jobs? What has been the impact of new materials and technologies that challenge handmade practices, such as thermoplastic film, which allows designers to transfer designs to a textile surface without stitching? Who is employed to do computer designing, laser cutting, and 3-D printing in today s fashion industries? Have these new processes changed traditional gender dynamics in the field? In 1859 Isaac Merritt Singer introduced the Letter A Family Sewing Machine and touted it as a labor-saving device, and yet women also used sewing machines to work in industry and small shops, and to do piecework at home. Meanwhile, advertising trade cards told women they d be much more glamorous dressed in their machine-made fashions. Have things changed? In the exhibit catalog, Bolton suggests that in the future, home versions of 3-D printers will help democratize haute couture by allowing people to customize their own fashion designs and explore their own individuality. Will 3-D printers someday be a boon to both women and men 262

8 WOSKK KManus x Machina who would like to custom tailor their own clothing? For that, we ll have to wait and see. Although the exhibit raised tantalizing and often unanswered questions, what it did spectacularly well was demonstrate the remarkable dynamic between handmade and machine-made fashions today, and the way some of the show s best designers made canny use of today s innovative technologies. Some of the most beautifully crafted technological fashions in the exhibit were three prêt-à-porter shimmering dresses presented in spring/summer 2016 by French-born designer Nicolas Ghesquière for Louis Vuitton. They had softly shaped bodices and waved tulle skirts ornamented with celluloid sequins cut into strips by lasers and machine-glued onto the tulle. The sequins were spray-painted to create the illusion of shadows because, as the designer said, I wanted everything to look imperfect. What was especially intriguing about these dresses was the role of accident. In an interview included in the catalog, Ghesquière said that when the laser-cut fabric arrived from the factory he thought it looked too flat, but when he began to fold it, bubbles appeared so that the sequins took on the shape of a croissant. He calls this a happy accident when the material reacted in an unexpected way. Designers may be clever enough to modify the dress into a new possibility, which is quite magical when that happens. Ghesquière seems to embody the cautious relationship today s designers have with technology. In his interview with Bolton, he told how in his 2008 collection he combined hand-draped tops inspired by the paintings of Velázquez but finished the designs with laser cutting and ultrasonic welding, noting that in the right hands a machine can create incredibly beautiful garments. You can become extremely emotional over the way a skilled worker controls a machine to create a garment that is close to perfection. Still, he also said, I m very wary of becoming too reliant on technology because the design process has to remain instinctive. What does seem clear in the exhibit is that when designers join the instinctive with the mechanistic, the hand-crafted and the technological, the result can indeed be magical. EXHIBIT REVIEW Bibliography Bolton, Andrew. Manus x Machina: Fashion in An Age of Technology. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wosk, Julie. On the Cover: Metropolis. Technology and Culture 51, no. 2 (April 2010): Update on the Film Metropolis. Technology and Culture 51, no. 4 (October 2010):

MANUS X MACHINA CURATOR TAKES RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONFUSED MET GALA RED CARPET

MANUS X MACHINA CURATOR TAKES RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONFUSED MET GALA RED CARPET 11:31 AM PDT 6/22/2016 by Booth Moore From left: Susan Casden, Andrew Bolton and Tatiana Sorokko Donato Sardella/WireImage