One of the first bias tailoring patterns made by Madeleine Vionnetdating from the 1920s, was composed of four simple squares of fabric. The couturier's dream was a dress with only one seam and she came pretty close: only four seams, centre front, centre back and on the hips.
Vionnet was the undisputed queen of tailoring technique, one of the last true inventors of form and workmanship. So cultured was she that she was able to apply mathematics to tailoring: golden section and logarithmic spiral, to name but a few.
The craft that he did so well was held in high regard in the social sphere, as much as that of artists devoted to painting or sculpture, and men and women turned to tailors not only to learn about the latest trends in clothes, but also to approach a culture of beauty that spanned the different spheres of social living.
Today, the term 'tailor' seems to have lost to some extent the meaning it had taken on in the years when fashion was almost exclusively made up of eclectic personalities, who understood tailoring and sewing and art at the same time, who shaped fabrics and realised small great revolutions in costume.
Yet tailoring remains fertile ground for very interesting experiments, not only in haute couture, which is the main place where even extreme experiments in styles and shapes can be dared.
An interesting experiment took place in Paris a couple of years ago, inside the Musée Galliera. It was a performance somewhere between art and craft, featuring the director of the same museum, Olivier Saillard, and the actress Tilda Swinton. The title was Eternity Dress.
Both Saillard and Swinton were not new to this kind of experiment; just the year before, they had staged another performance, The Impossible Wardrobein which the actress wore a selection of dresses chosen from the museum's historical archive with a thoroughly contemporary attitude, thus creating a temporal short circuit through the various currents of fashion history.
To be fair, tailoring has several times passed unscathed through phases that wanted it dead, in favour of an idea of contemporaneity that later turned out to be short-sighted. Just think of the advent of the ready-to-wear or the proliferation of low-cost lines. However today the tailoring sector enjoys renewed attentionas well as handicrafts in general, and we are seeing the opening of courses of study that also cover the practical aspects of fashion.
Among the experiments involving contemporary tailoring, there are also more technological ones, which tell of a future in which this art could do without needle and thread. One of these was made by an Israeli scientist, described as one of the 20 talents that will change the world: Oxman Blacks.
The scientist and architect designed 3D printers that work by reproducing the effect of human skin, which is always the same, but with different characteristics depending on the part of the body it covers. Thus its printers mix several acrylics and deposit them in varying densitiesthus making it possible to obtain continuous surfaces but with different physical characteristicsin order to better adapt to different parts of the body.
Tailoring 2.0
Design objects, including clothes, have already been produced with this technology. Iris van Herpen is the designer who first experimented with the possibilities of these printers for her haute couture line, Voltage. Who but you, who can magically combine high craftsmanship techniques with futuristic technologies?
The possible applications of this technology are yet to be explored and open up fascinating scenarios for fashion: already, attempts are being made to create structures that mimic the weaving of silkworms, making clothes like cocoons, which adapt to the body. This might suggest that we will one day see our tailors as trained scientists.
Or rather it could be one of several currents within a vast and certainly much more diverse field than is commonly imagined.
[The article is an excerpt from the June 2017 issue of Design Lifestyle Magazine]
