Word: fabrics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Alors, Pierre. The unstructured jacket. An easeful elegance without stricture. Tailoring of a kind thought possible only when done by hand. The layering of fabrics by pattern, texture and color so that clothing takes on for a second the quiet shimmer of a 17th century Japanese print. Surprising combinations of garments-leather pants as part of a suit, a long jacket over foreshortened slacks, a vest worn over a coat-that scramble clichés and conventions into a new and effortless redefinition of style. A functional celebration of fabric. A reshaping of traditional geometry with witty contours, sudden symmetries...
This all may not be a matter of great moment. But it is very much a matter of the moment, and what may now seem like a temporal fancy can become, decades hence, a tactile key into the past. Clothes are the fabric of history, the texture of time. And this time, right now, belongs to Armani...
Armani, who reversed the usual career pattern by designing for men before making women's clothes, brought not only his fine eye for fabric but his scrupulous tailoring to the women's line. "My first jackets for women," he confesses, "were in fact men's jackets in women's sizes." Says Stutz: "Taking that snappy, pinched-in-the-right-place Italian men's wear look and translating it into women's clothes was Armani's special contribution. No one had ever done that before...
...translation, in this case, was all in the tailoring: the moving of buttons and dropping of lapels, the sloping of shoulders and strategic modification of inner structure by following the Savile Row technique of not gluing the lining to the underside of the fabric. The result, an epiphany of choreographed rumple, was like cutting the buckles and taking the stuffing from a straitjacket. Citizens out for a stroll down a sunny American boulevard, or cabbing to a cocktail party, or even (gasp!) commuting to their office, looked like first-class cruise passengers who had just unpacked for a walk around...
English astrophysicist Steven Hawking, who spent the last two weeks at Harvard lecturing and meeting with researchers, has devoted most of his life to studying these gashes in the fabric of space and time. I've always wanted to understand why the world is what it is and how it works," says Hawking, now a successor to Sir Isaac Newton as Lucastan Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Since, according to Hawking, "we already know completely the laws that govern normal matter," his goal is to extend such knowledge to extreme conditions. Nothing is more extreme than a black hole...