in 2000, hussein chalayan hid an entire collection inside a living room
the room is already wearing the collection
In London in February 2000, Hussein Chalayan staged a small living room at the end of his runway. Four chairs sat beneath gray slipcovers around a low coffee table, and a television sat beyond. Before the models appeared, a family entered and settled into it. It was a strangely familiar setting, as it suggested a domestic space temporarily transplanted into a theater. For the audience, the furniture was background scenery, and it sat there long enough that it was almost forgotten.
The garments passing through the space offered a few clues. Pockets expanded to hold objects taken from the room, and seams traced shapes around the body with architectural precision. Still, the living room remained a living room. Viewers watched the collection move past it, unaware that some garments had been sitting in front of them from the beginning.
After Words, Hussein Chalayan, Fall/Winter 2000 | images courtesy Hussein Chalayan
the audience sees the room again
Toward the end of After Words, four models approached the chairs and began removing their gray covers. The fabric came away from the furniture and wrapped around their bodies as dresses. The chairs themselves were then folded down and carried away like luggage. Designer Hussein Chalayan later said this sequence, when the models first began stripping the chairs, interested him even more than the coffee table transformation that would become the show’s most famous image.
The audience, with this climactic reveal, is forced to reconsider something it’s been looking at all along. A chair cover becomes clothing — however, the more interesting transformation takes place in the viewer’s head. The set had been part of the collection from the start. Chalayan just withheld that information. For a few seconds, everyone in the theater has to mentally replay the room they thought they understood.
After Words, Hussein Chalayan, Fall/Winter 2000
taking the room with you
After Words grew from Chalayan’s thinking around wartime displacement and his own family history in Cyprus. His mother had been forced from her home as a teenager during the violence that preceded the island’s division in 1974. Chalayan began thinking about the compressed decisions that come with evacuation — a person may have only minutes to decide what can leave the house with them. In the collection, possessions disappear into clothes and furniture gains a second function built around escape.
Seen through that context, the finale changes once more. A model approaches the circular wooden coffee table and removes its center before stepping inside and lifting it toward her waist to create a rigid wooden skirt. She walks away wearing part of the room. By the end, the furniture has been dismantled and carried off to leave the living room empty.
After Words, Hussein Chalayan, Fall/Winter 2000
clothes that only make sense in motion
Chalayan returned to this kind of transformation throughout his work. In Before Minus Now, shown just before After Words, a fiberglass dress used remote-controlled panels that opened across the body like parts of an aircraft.
Several years later, One Hundred and Eleven used concealed mechanics to move garments through historical silhouettes while the models stood onstage. Even while the technology changes, the recurring idea is remains to be that the garment reaches its full meaning through an event.
Even while a still photograph can preserve Chalayan’s table skirt, it will miss the most important part. The strangeness of After Words is seeing one identity become another and realizing that both existed at the same time.
Chalayan designed the clothes as well as the audience’s delay in understanding them. For much of the show, everyone thinks they are looking at a living room. By the end, every object in it has become something that could leave with the body.
Before Minus Now, Hussein Chalayan, Spring/Summer 2000
One Hundred and Eleven, Hussein Chalayan, Spring/Summer 2007