“Less is more.” You’ve probably seen those words a lot recently. There are weeks when you can’t open a style magazine without seeing the phrase, captioning photoshoots filled with elegantly streamlined garments, or punctuating editors’ letters focusing on “fashion’s new mood”. It’s fast becoming the mantra for the seductive, dark simplicity that dominated the runways for Winter 2011.
But for five years of my university life at Dublin’s School of Architecture, it was practically a doctrine. The phrase – adopted from an obscure Robert Browning poem, by legendary modernist architect Mies van der Rohe – became one of the twentieth century’s defining dictums, and a yardstick against which everything we designed in those years, from furniture to skyscrapers, was measured. Born in the late 19th century, Mies (for some reason always known by his first name, just like Madonna) became both founding father and figurehead for a generation rebelling against the excesses of Victorian whimsy and Art Nouveau decadence, championing the enthralling possibilities of the dawning Machine Age with all its breathtaking innovations: mass production, technological innovation, social fluidity, and creative liberation. By ridding themselves of traditional restraints, he and his contemporaries reshaped the built environment forever, ushering in a cult of provocatively abstract simplicity which reverberated through every aspect of modern culture, from art and music to literature and fashion. Limitless planes of clear glass, sheer walls of raw concrete and marble, elegant stalactites of steel and dazzling aluminium skins – a refined, purist, remorselessly disciplined language of clean lines and perfect proportions, reinventing buildings as supremely efficient containers for living.
Fashion, however, was relatively slow to embrace this new world order – although seminal photographers from Weston to Man Ray to Horst were pioneering a stripped-back, athletic abstraction which chimed in with the mood of the time. Groundbreaking designers like Chanel and Poiret had radically altered the structure and silhouette of womenswear, flinging the corset aside and engineering a new sense of freedom and power, but it was to be a long time before clothes started to actually look as modern as the world itself. It may have been a reflection of the clientele’s status and tastes (for fashion remained an elite, members-only coterie for much of the century’s first half). It took the youth explosion of the Sixties, and the overthrow of couture by new ready-to-wear labels like Cardin, for minimalist fashion to really begin to take hold.
But by then the built environment had already started to move on, proving itself to be just as vulnerable to the cycles of fashion as anything else: led by Robert Venturi, a new generation gleefully proclaimed “Less is a Bore”, and went to town with a riot of postmodern ornament, colour, and texture. And it wasn’t until the early nineties that fashion and architecture started to finally slip into synergy.
Looking back, that last decade before the millennium (a period largely written-off as a dry spell of quiet tastefulness between Eighties extravagance and post-2001 anarchy) has a rare sense of cohesion and clarity. Helmut Lang, Raf Simons, Juergen Teller, Hedi Slimane, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ann Demeulemeester, Herzog & De Meuron, Corinne Day – a group of designers and image-makers combining to create a moment of raw, unvarnished (but beautifully romantic) simplicity. Scrubbed-face models in plain, deconstructed monochromes and sheers, expressively photographed in black and white against pale plaster or exposed concrete. There was a vulnerability and honesty to Simons’ delicately frayed hems and Tillmans’ bleak natural light, embodying a long-overdue sense of harmony between man and the brutal, often-ugly poetry of the world Mies van der Rohe and his successors created.
And now (once again) minimalism is back, fine-tuned for our conflicted age of tortured austerity and whispered luxury. But this new minimalism is one of a very different kind. It’s surprisingly complicated. It takes a lot of work for John Pawson or David Chipperfield to create a perfect, detail-free, luminous white interior. It echoes that famous scene in Scorsese’s “The Aviator”, where Howard Hughes demands that every bolt on his dazzling chrome airplane be painstakingly sanded down to invisibility, striving for a vanishing-point image of absolute perfection. And fashion – from Phoebe Philo’s exquisite tailoring, to Ennio Capasa’s graphic sleekness at Costume National, to Rick Owens’ sculptural drapes, to Hannah Marshall’s hidden braille-embossed linings – has evolved a language of sharp precision which conceals a near-obsessive mastery of craftsmanship and complex detail. An aesthetic finally embracing the challenging power of contemporary technology: simultaneously less – and much, much more.
