What Happens to Architecture When Form Follows Fashion?

When form follows fashion, architecture borrows the language of clothing: pleated and folded surfaces, skins treated like fabric, and buildings designed as brand images. Architecture and fashion share tools, from structure and pattern to new materials, and the exchange has produced memorable garments and buildings. The risk is time: a dress is made for a season, a building for 50 years or more, so architecture that follows fashion too closely can date fast. This article, for architects, students and design-minded readers, explains the principles the two disciplines share, compares fashion designs with the buildings that inspired them, and analyses the fashion flagships of Tokyo’s Omotesando as precedents.

Architecture is in constant conversation with the culture around it, taking ideas from trends and setting new ones. Fashion runs in parallel: an industry even more shaped by trends and events. Both use geometry, structure, material and colour to shape space around the body; one is inhabited, the other worn.

Architecture and fashion: a shared language

“Dressmaking is the architecture of movement.”
—Pierre Balmain

The French couturier Pierre Balmain, who studied architecture before turning to fashion, is widely quoted as saying that nothing in a dress is more important than its construction. The Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré, who trained as an architect in Milan, was nicknamed “the architect of fashion” for his structural approach. “Architectural fashion”, sometimes called wearable architecture, describes clothing that uses the methods of building: fabrics pleated, folded, layered and stiffened to stand away from the body, and garments assembled from repeated parts like a façade.

The exchange also runs the other way. Zaha Hadid was best known for buildings, but she also worked with fashion brands on objects and spaces: shoes for Melissa and Lacoste, the NOVA shoe made with United Nude in 2013, and the touring Mobile Art pavilion for Chanel, as AnOther recounts. Fashion houses such as Balenciaga regularly cite buildings in their collections.

Fashion and the buildings that inspired it

The pairs below set runway designs beside buildings with a similar form or surface. They are visual comparisons, not claims that each designer took the building as a source.

Above: Akris (spring 2008) beside Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, both built from repeated grey blocks of varying height.

Balenciaga (spring 2008) beside Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: metallic surfaces that fold and catch the light.

Chloé (spring/summer 2016) beside Moroccan carved-plaster arches: lace-like openwork in fabric and stucco.

Dolce & Gabbana (spring/summer 2012) beside a Gothic cathedral façade lit in colour: dense, jewel-like ornament.

KTZ (spring 2013) beside the Moorish-revival interiors of the Castello di Sammezzano in Tuscany: intricate white geometric pattern.

Gareth Pugh (spring 2009) beside Foster + Partners’ Hearst Tower in New York: a diagonal grid used as both structure and pattern.

Milly (spring/summer 2016) beside Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku: white, continuous, sweeping planes.

Paco Rabanne (fall 2013) beside the Guggenheim Bilbao again: small metal plates assembled into a shimmering skin.

FormFollowsFashion

The Greek architect Viktoria Lytra explored the same relationship in FormFollowsFashion, a series of montages that pair well-known buildings with runway garments, from Santiago Calatrava’s Reggio Emilia station to designs by Iris van Herpen, as Detail reported in 2018. The project presents both disciplines as ways of sheltering the human body, with aesthetics as their common ground.

“Architecture and fashion belong to the realm of creative arts, establishing a give and take relationship. Architectural identities are adopted by fashion in its affinity for experimental transformation. On the other hand, architecture is an ensemble of socio-morphological forces, drawing inspiration from the open-ended design of fashion scenery.”
—FormFollowsFashion

Lytra’s images play with shared geometric devices (pleats, curves, patterns and twists) across movements such as minimalism, deconstructivism and postmodernism.

Principles explained: what architecture and fashion share

• Structure versus skin. A tailored jacket has an inner structure (canvas, padding) and an outer cloth; a modern building has a frame and a façade. Both disciplines decide how much of the structure to show.
• Folding and pleating. Folding gives thin material stiffness, which is why pleated fabric holds a shape and why folded plates and origami-like roofs can span with little material.
• Pattern and repetition. Garments and façades are both built from repeated units (panels, scales, sequins, glazing modules) that create texture at a distance.
• Digital design and fabrication. Parametric software and 3D printing are now used in both fields; Iris van Herpen’s printed garments and freeform buildings rely on similar tools.
• Time. This is the key difference. Fashion is built to change each season; buildings must stay useful and acceptable for decades. When form follows fashion, the façade can date long before the structure wears out.

Our essay on ‘form follows anything’ looks at how far architecture has moved from Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function”. For a lighter look at how buildings and interiors signal status and taste, see our piece on Patrick Bateman’s apartment.

Precedent analysis: the fashion flagships of Omotesando

Tokyo’s Omotesando and Aoyama district is the clearest place to see what happens to architecture when fashion becomes the client. In the early 2000s, luxury brands commissioned leading architects to design flagship stores whose façades act as brand images. Three show the principles above.

Prada Aoyama by Herzog & de Meuron (2003) is a faceted glass crystal wrapped in a diamond-shaped structural grid fitted with flat, convex and concave glass panes, so the building’s skin is its structure and its pattern at once.

Tod’s Omotesando by Toyo Ito (2004) uses a concrete façade patterned like the silhouettes of the trees along the avenue; the “branches” are the structure, thickening at the base and thinning towards the top.

Dior Omotesando by SANAA (2004) is a stack of white boxes whose outer glass skin sits in front of a translucent, wavy acrylic screen, recalling layered fabric; SANAA designed the building’s envelope while the brand chose its own interior designers, as Dezeen reports.

The lesson of Omotesando is that fashion clients can produce lasting architecture when the brand image grows out of structure and material rather than applied decoration. More than two decades on, these three buildings are still studied, while many short-lived shop fit-outs around them have changed several times.

Sources and further reading

• Detail: FormFollowsFashion by Viktoria Lytra (German).
• AnOther: when architecture met fashion in the hands of Zaha Hadid.
• Dezeen: SANAA’s Dior Omotesando.
• Archiweb: Toyo Ito, Tod’s Omotesando.