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The recent Radical Fashion exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) was an aesthetically rich total experience. It was relatively small, unlike the previous fashion exhibition at the V&A (The Cutting Edge: Fifty Years of British Fashion 1947-1997), held in 1997. Then the display had been crowded and busy, whereas on this occasion a special environment had been created to enhance the exhibits. The visitor entered a dimly lit, cavernous black space to the sound of electronic music. Beyond an archway examples of each chosen designer's work were displayed in alcoves, some softly, some brightly lit. On the black walls separating the alcoves were written designers' aphorisms and above our heads screens displayed silently moving videos of catwalk shows. The haunting music added to the sub-aquatic feel of the exhibition.
The emphasis, as the title suggests, was on innovation. Several white dresses by Juny a Watanabe Comme des Garc ons seemed to have been made out of spun sugar and whorled into such elaborately pleated and gofered creations that it was hard to see, beautiful though they were, how they would fit onto anybody. The techniques applied to the man-made organza resulted in a maze of labyrinthine frills and furbelows. Issy Miyake's boldly coloured tubes (vermilion, lime green, black, yellow, turquoise) were also technically innovative; the idea being that the wearer would just chop off the length of tubing required and cut and shape it into the desired garment.
Then there were sections devoted to the work of Azzedine Alaia and Yohji Yamamoto, whose designs more conventionally focused on ideals of glamour, elegance and femininity. There were flattering, simple dresses and suits, often in black or neutral colours, that you could imagine wearing here and now rather than in some utopian future.
By contrast the pieces by Maison Martin Margiela (Margiela specializes in the recycling of used and secondhand garments) were far more intellectual and theoretical, inspired it seemed by the trouvaille of a very stout dress stand made to measure for the client of some long-forgotten tailor or dressmaker. Margiela had designed several large-sized garments - 50% larger than 'normal': an enormous, customized pair of jeans pinned together at the waist to make them smaller again; a 1960s dress enlarged...