scape
The Barbara King Landscape Architecture Scholarship for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Fashion
scape
Alex Priest
Fashion
amsterdam antwerpen barcelona berlin bilbao bordeaux den haag d端sseldorf groningen
london luxembourg city nice paris rotterdam sicily stockholm utrecht zaanse schaans
“People constantly make the mistake of comparing London with New York, Milan and Paris and that’s not what its about. London has its own fashion identity.” - Anna Wintour “We are the ingredients of a normal pedestrian urban landscape” -Marc Jacobs
fashionscape
The integration of fashion design with the principles of landscape architecture shows how each design field can help build upon each other’s principles to form a synthesized fashionscape. Looking for inspiration outside the normal realm of historical and contemporary landscape architecture and into the fabricated realm of fashion design is unavoidable in the advancement of aesthetic design. In my opinion, this exploration into a fashionscape will advance the ideas of both
fields to relate the inevitable pretexts of aesthetic, cultural and contextually defined design. I see landscape architecture as a flexible field, able to adapt culturally, historically, contextually and “naturally.� Spaces come alive with people and our identities as humans are expressed through dress. Spaces can also become transformed through fashion design due to the vitality of aesthetics with our everyday lives. The world of fashion design and landscape
architecture hinge on the multisensory experience of cultural aesthetics. Designers are constantly reevaluating what is current, what has happened before and what should happen in the future. The fusion between contemporary fashion design and landscape architecture begins to illustrate how both can work together to generate and build upon landscape architectural principles to re-configure the spaces of the 21st century. I believe that the relationship with the urban fabric can be harnessed to create new places, because fashionscape are unavoidable in the urban context The process of my Barbara King Scholarship project took me to fifteen different European
cities and has allowed me to comprehend landscape architecture as a dynamic and reactionary element within the environment. This project evolved from my initial search for fashion in the landscape, and has “ended� with my realization, through collage, that an understanding of fashionscape is a much denser concept. I am suggesting that fashion and landscape are not separate, but one in the same. Fashion is not about clothes, just like landscape architecture is not about plants.. They are deeply cultural concepts with omnipresent qualities. By dissecting each city and re-pasting it together into a collage the city can be understood in a new way. The collages become a fashionscape. Landscape architecture is about understanding the environment
from the micro to macro scale, and I believe that fashion is a way of understanding the environment. Through the process of traveling, documenting and re-assembling the cities I have evolved. I have begun to recognize different aspects of myself and I have seen a melding of my influences. It has been as much a learning process about self as it has been about landscape architecture. Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist blog captures the essence of a city through the people that inhabit it. He creates a visual dialogue and visual understanding of a city by documenting his curiosities. He is not documenting trends or the latest fashion; he is documenting fashion in context. By redefining what topical
information I had obtained from each city and re-assembling it into an abstract collage about context many unique situations arise that promote a new way to understand the environment. Curating the collages from my lens as a landscape architecture undergraduate, they become about a point of view and not a report on a product. Abstractly the project could be called “Wear are you at?� Because it is as much about the context as it is about fashion. -Alex Priest, 2011
amsterdam
amsterdam
amsterdam
amsterdam
amsterdam
amsterdam
amsterdam
amsterdam
antwerpen
antwerpen
antwerpen
barcelona
berlin
bilbao
den haag
d端sseldorf
london
london
london
london
luxembourg city
paris
paris
paris
paris
paris
rotterdam
rotterdam
sicily
stockholm