Designer: Givenchy and Balenciaga
Influence: Bauhaus School
Riccardo Tisci, creative director for Givenchy, had a number of inspirations for his Fall 2010 Ready-to-Wear collection. Tisci stated:
“I was thinking of the ski world, and the scuba world, and the colors of the Bauhaus.”
When I first found out what inspired his collection, I wondered how so many things could have influenced one line. After viewing Tisci’s designs, however, I was very impressed with what I saw. With a fall line consisting of solely black, red, and beige pieces, Givenchy successfully pulls off the Bauhaus look.
In 1919, Walter Gropius formed Bauhaus, a school in Germany centered in crafts and fine arts. The aim of the Bauhaus school was to experiment with how they learned design and how they could teach it. An engagement with materiality and total design was essential in understanding how everyday objects functioned. Furniture making, set design, architecture, and topography are a sample of the things Bauhaus influenced. The Cantilever and Wassily chairs, made from bike tubing, were two of the modern pieces of furniture that came out of the school.
Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919:
“to go into buildings, endow them with fairy tales…and build in fantasy without regard for technical difficulty”
Having recently learned about the Bauhaus school in my modern architecture class, I was really happy and excited to see Givenchy look towards the innovative school for inspiration.
Another high end designer, Balenciaga seems to have been influenced by the Bauhaus school. This fierce pair of color block sandals is reminiscent of the school’s minimalist color scheme and use of geometric shapes. When set beside one another, Balenciaga’s sandals are evocative of advertisement posters made for the school.
From this post, I really think you can see how fashion, art, and architecture are interrelated and overlap one another. While each is different in its own right, they all build off of one another when it comes to the sharing of ideas. In discussing fashion, art, and architecture, the questions that need to be asked are, “what are we doing?” and “how do we get there?” To constantly come up with innovative designs, compositions, and structurally correct buildings, these questions are essential.
