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You might think that the relationship between architecture and fashion is a bit, well, unfashionable; that it's one of those old mid- nineties fads such as architecture and film or architecture and dance composed of spurious or partial comparisons, which used to be based on the work of a few people with interdisciplinary interests. We have now largely got over the "architecture and" ghettos in this multidisciplinary age.
As the eminently fashionable designer Bruce Mau explained in London this week, though the world has been split into professional slices since the Industrial Revolution, designers are now, increasingly, working across the constraining limits of professional disciplines. In fact, speaking to a range of the UK's absolutely most fashionable architects yielded - after a somewhat disconcerted introduction - a broad range of serious issues. Don't assume fashion's a limited professional matter, and its relationship to architecture is just to do with cut, material, structure, environment, production and images. Whether architecture is fashionable or like fashion goes way beyond the simple ambiguity: is architecture like fashion?/what is fashionable in architecture?
"It sounds like a frivolous title, but it's a very serious one," says Adam Caruso of Caruso St John. "It's a long subject which defines people's position. There are people who are avid to be at the height of fashion - we all know who they are," he says. "And there are those who believe architecture should be concerned with broader public issues, and with longevity. Old fogeys like us," adds Caruso.
But, in fact, no one in architecture seems to want to be fashionable. Or at least, they don't want to say so. Oliver Salway, of Softroom, most famous for its fictional interiors for Wallpaper* (but which seems to have a hidden heart of old-fashioned authenticity), agrees. "Architects are good at beating themselves up for being less cool, less hip, less fashionable than everyone else", he says. "Maybe architecture shouldn't be more like fashion. Maybe fashion should be less fashionable."
Urban Salon's...