“The melodic contour of the song describes the land over which the song passes…. A musical phrase is a map reference. Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.” So wrote Bruce Chatwin in 1987’s The Songlines about the indigenous Australian way of seeing the landscape and its history. Hussein Chalayan attempted to adopt this perspective from half a globe away to inform a pre-fall collection whose contours made for their own wearable melody.
The swooping back-and-forth panels in his deliriously irregular bimaterial dress resembled the arcs of the Google Maps journey from his home in Farringdon to his office behind Camden Market that was pinned to his mood board as part of his application of outback animism to his own urban experience. Chalayan said he was attempting to “create space” and to “navigate the fabric,” and you could see the evidence in the sliced but button-fastenable garments or the layered, disjunctive knits with zigzagging ribbed panels. The topography of the body was further mapped via some masterfully space-inhabiting tailoring. The black-and-white print echoed the “dot paintings” of aboriginal art, the only literal nod in a collection based on a beautiful, different way of thinking about and seeing the world around us.
