Overalls in reverse perspective – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Workwear exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam is dedicated, as its name suggests, to workwear – but it says more about modern fashion than many fashion exhibitions.
“Workwear is about functional clothing, clothing as a tool. From industrial workwear to denim, workwear has a huge impact on what we wear in our private lives,” writes workwear researcher and exhibition curator Eldina Bezhik.
These words not only do not raise any objections, but seem to be a statement of the well-known. For about the last 100 years, the search for new beauty, new means of expression in fashion, as in any design, in everything related to the subject environment, has been moving precisely in the direction of everything industrial, working, professional.
The material collected at the exhibition – from the Rijksmuseum, from the Van Abbe Museum, from the Smithsonian Institution, from the Westminster Menswear Archive, from private collections and archives – makes a grand impression. The way Workwear is conceived and organized lends a very compelling beauty to literally every item in this exhibition, from the orange overalls of the Rotterdam janitors to the x-ray print of Neil Armstrong’s helmet and space suit that landed on the moon. But this is only one aspect of the exhibition.
Workwear is not a fashion show, but uses fashion as one of its contexts, along with contemporary art and theater design. All these contexts are designated quite discretely. Video of the 1969 performance Red Coat – Same Skin For Everybody by the French artist and feminist Nicola L., where 11 people are moving through the streets of the city in one huge red raincoat with 22 sleeves. Several pieces of art by Brazilian modernist artist Ligia Clark, made directly from protective clothing. Textile performative sculpture by German conceptualist Franz Erhard Walther “WalFormations” from 1984, working with the image of yellow in overalls. And just a few more things – if we talk about art. Costumes for Meyerhold’s productions in 1922, Varvara Stepanova’s The Death of Tarelkin and Lyubov Popova’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, restored as replicas in 1979 by Erica Hoffmann-König, speaking of theater.
And speaking of fashion, there is Yamamoto from the early 2000s, one each by Helmut Lang and Issei Miyake around the same time, several pieces by Massimo Osti and his CP Company and Stone Island, Japanese denim by Kapital and Buaisou. Well, and also Margell’s tabi in the opening part of the exhibition: the real tabi of Japanese workers next to Margela’s tabi also begin to look like an object of fashion, and in his tabi, on the contrary, some special clarity of intent appears, although we have long known about their prototype, and in general about Margiela’s relationship with work clothes.
Workwear has no context more inclusive than fashion – not only that which is entirely built around all kinds of outdoor, sports and uniforms, but big fashion, grand house fashion and designer brand fashion. Just like modern fashion, there is practically no context more important, useful and functional than work clothes – the way a modern person dresses, the way he looks in everyday life, consists of 90% of it.
Here we need to make an important clarification: when we talk about work clothes, we mean not just jeans or white T-shirts (which used to be just work clothes) and not even just blue work jackets (although this is the one made especially for the Nieuwe Instituut exhibition and company Bonne Suits, exhibited among the exhibits and sold in the museum shop), but about more specific and more complex things: about the costumes of pilots, firefighters, road workers, employees of sanitary and epidemiological services – that is, about real overalls. It is she who is the main content of the exhibition “Workwear”. Looking at all these amazingly beautiful working things, we, of course, see the fashion that was inspired, generated and approved by them, the exhibition space simply sharpens our vision and brings the perfect focus.
For example, the cream-colored protective suit of a 1935 health department officer (GGD). It is kept in the Museum of Rotterdam as a historical object, but, placed in this exhibition, it turns into a fashion item that could very well be in the latest seasonal collection – or even Jonathan Anders. Or the 1974 EMF radiation suit, made of silver-plated nylon mesh, designed to protect against high-power radar radiation – you can imagine it anywhere from the Raf Simons collection to the senior year collection of any famous fashion college.
The electrically heated suit of American pilots of the 1940s evokes Simons’ couture collection for Dior AW 2014, moreover, it almost seems to be part of it. Butcher’s chain mail apron, 1970s-1990s, immediately stands next to any Paco Raban outfit. And the 1920s Japanese firefighter uniforms, made with sashiko, darning/fine stitch embroidery from the Edo era, used by peasants and fishermen, now look like a super trendy coat from a cool concept store. My favorite item here is a blue denim anti-grav suit of Polish pilots from the 1960s – a dream come true for Kanye and Demna. The exhibition moves it from a strictly functional field to a purely aesthetic one, from workwear to fashionable clothes, and the external pressure tubes with which it is stitched look like a cool decorative device.
That is, this carefully curated collection of things correlated with each other and with all contexts creates the effect of a reverse projection: not working clothes onto fashionable clothes, which have long been familiar and understandable to us, but, on the contrary, fashionable clothes onto working clothes. Walking through the galleries of the Nieuwe Instituut, you feel like you are at a contemporary fashion exhibition. And this has a new meaning, beyond the simple influence of work clothes on the way we dress, declared by the creators of the exhibition.
The exhibition reveals an important point in building relationships between fashion, art and workwear. The futurists and constructivists (represented at the exhibition by theatrical costumes of Stepanova and Popova) were more attracted not by specific samples of work clothes, but by the very concept of the beauty of everything industrial, that is, new and anti-bourgeois. Their work clothes of the revolutionary present and bright future are the fruit of their imagination.
These experiments, of course, did not go unnoticed for modern fashion, but over the past 50 years, fashion has increasingly concentrated on real work clothes, on their specific varieties and details. This can be seen not only in the products of fashion brands and the creativity of individual designers, but also in street fashion: now you constantly meet people directly wearing work clothes, new or vintage, as casual clothes, using them to look modern and fashionable. Modern fashion at the current stage, literally now, has approached working clothes as close as possible. This is evidenced, among other things, by the widespread collaborations of large luxury houses with special clothing brands. The exhibition “Workwear” also speaks of this – and speaks in the most convincing and exciting way.
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