In this egalitarian age it is almost a given that mens and womens clothing are more like hereditarily imposed classifications that are attributed with seeming caprice to attire for the sake of distribution, rather than to reflect true division. It is becoming mundane that designers can, and often do design nearly identical collections for both genders, be it well-established houses such as Calvin Klein, that has long been associated with boy-girl androgyny, re-launched in this year’s renewal of the CK one line, Jonathan Saunders’ effortless gender crossovers, or younger designers such as J.W Anderson, who’s AW 11 exemplified the hitherto with an idiosyncratic British take. When florals have become the commodity of both sexes, as witnessed in this past mens spring collection, it seems peculiar that designers would choose to return time and time again to seek inspiration in the gender specific form of the burqa.
I remember encountering this seemingly self-detrimental juxtaposition, of traditional Islamic dress with the ever evolving and provoking world of fashion in an archived video of a Hussein Chalayan’s 98’s “Between” show. A row of snow-white women took to the runway, denuded gradually from the full cover of a chador and hijab to the sounds of an ominously shrill violin ballade.
Not all references incline to the avant-garde realm of Chalayan’s installation. Since, the burqa has inspired a myriad of interpretations and has evoked various airs, many in sync with the contemporary notion of gender indifferent fashion. Last year’s winner of Vogue, Alta Roma’s “Who is On Next” competition, Turkish born designer Erkan Çoruh, shed the historic female inclination of the burqa, in his collection entitled ‘The Men & Women of Allah’, by covering both sexes in chamois suede drapes, so that it became quite perplexing trying to tell them apart. Nadir Tejani, a recent LCF graduate, utilized the incognito of the burqa silhouette in his collection, in which he aimed to offer a solution to the urban invasion of individual privacy, much like the notion delivered in Todd Lynn’s AW 11 transcending necklines, which culminated in mouth concealing, identity protecting collars.
There is a certain cleanliness that the burqa and garments emblematic to that form exude, as the over-sized cut camouflages any segments of the human physic, creating an outlandish un-gentrified figure. In Rick Owens’ womens AW11 collection, mohair floor length capes, head raps, sleeked back hair and over- sized layered armour like tops, created an elongated geometric silhouette which suggested monastic purity (much like Damir Doma’s womens collection), while his preceding mens SS collection mirrored this with a softer air, through cascading draped skirts, paired with longer hair and face shrouding shades, that put masculinity out of kilter for the sake of a more transcendental vision. Gareth Pugh too, introduced ethereal lightness to his stygian black, mixed womenswear and menswear show, attaching chiffon skirts and bell-bottom pants to otherwise restrictive jagged shouldered, torso defining tops. This together with long black hooded robes, occasionally eclipsed by cobalt blue or horizontally aligned panels of gold, in Egyptian Pharaoh-style, suggested the royal opulence of pagan gods.
Androgyny and godliness have long been linked, dating back to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s “Symposium”, which states that the primal human nature consisted of three sexes, the third being a union between female and male. The primitive human was described as a round being with two faces set in opposite directions. It possessed titanic strength, which it vainly planned to leash against the gods. The god’s nonchalant response to this insolence was to simply split all humans in half, which accounts for our “flat fish” one sided physic, and “fractured” soul. Maybe the inclination towards the volume of the burqa and the abstraction of form and mystic it offers, is a primal instinct geared to once more reach a more celestial, unified form, veering closer to divinity.
