Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan is known as fashion’s big thinker. From his endlessly whirring mind come future-gazing garments that transcend the runway and live outside of trend. Vogue declared his Spring 2007 show, in which metal animatronic dresses rapidly morphed through more than a century of silhouettes, a moment of pure magic. And magic is what we’ve come to expect from this technology-obsessed conjurer whose designs continually challenge any received notions of what fashion can be.

“Fashion’s arch avant-gardist,” as Vogue has described him, was seen as something of a mad professor during his student days at Central Saint Martins. His graduation collection of rusted, romantically decomposed clothing—which had been buried in a friend’s backyard and exhumed six weeks later—put him on the map, and the cerebral, bordering-on-bizarre productions that followed placed him in the company of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano; the prodigiously talented trio was credited with raising the bar for English design in the ’90s.

Chalayan crosses disciplines to explore the latest innovations in science, design, music, and multimedia arts. In a series of subtle mechanical movements, a molded white resin dress from Spring 2000 revealed the moving parts of an airplane (allowing the wearer to metaphorically fly away). A Spring 2008 shift was rigged with Swarovski crystals and 200 lasers to emit a brilliant red light. And for Fall 2011, a robot dress shot out spring-loaded crystals, which were meant to suggest pollen.

“The only new work you can do in fashion is via technology,” Chalayan once said. “It lets you create something you couldn’t have done in the past.” Transformation is one of Chalayan’s favorite subjects. An expert tailor and pattern-cutter, he has shown Tyvek garments that could be folded and sent in the mail. He’s had runway models walk offstage literally wearing the living room furniture (the collapsible wooden coffee-table skirt from that Fall 2000 collection is one of his best-known pieces).