Reconstructed Vintage Tea Dress
While fashion’s adoption of deconstructive strategies is not as theoretically influenced as that of architecture, deconstructed garments with frayed edges, exposed seams, and deliberate holes and slashes began to appear in high fashion in the influential early collections of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, which were shown in Paris around the same time deconstructivist theories were being discussed and debated by architects. Interestingly, “deconstruction” was not a term used by designers to describe their work, but was applied later by fashion writers. Bill Cunningham first applied the term in the March 1990 issue of Details, and Amy M. Spindler’s 1993 New York Times article “Coming Apart” cemented it in the fashion lexicon through her discussion of the lineage and influence of the Japanese designers on a younger generation of Belgians including Martin Margiela and Dries Van Noten. Margiela’s work with deconstruction is arguably the most conceptual and complex in fashion, and his method of appropriating and taking apart vintage clothes and reassembling them results in garments that seem completely new.
