Hasta La Ideas

New York architecture studio Bureau V showed its debut menswear collection based on theories by German architect Gottfried Semper during New York Fashion Week.

Bureau V centred its first foray into fashion design around Semper’s nineteenth-century Stoffwechseltheorie, which describes the replication of old construction techniques when implementing new materials.

With this in mind, the studio used the performance-driven shapes of cycling shorts and fisherman’s waders and created garments in lighter, textured fabrics and a minimal palette.

“We’ve shifted the materials and tweaked the shapes to migrate some of the forms of this clothing outside of sport and into a more formal setting,” Bureau V’s Peter Zuspan told Dezeen.

Oxford shirts with mesh vents under the arms and bibbed long johns feature in the 12-piece collection, along with felt T-shirts and tweed shorts.

White and light grey tones help to emphasise the textures such as waffle cotton knit and quilted cellulose fabric, plus diverge from the overuse of black in architect’s clothes according to Zuspan.

“The original reason we chose the colours was a minor protest to architects’ (and New Yorkers’) longterm obsession with black,” he told Dezeen. “That said, we also appreciate the light colour’s ability to show off the more sculptural details in the clothing with minimal lighting.”

The studio enjoyed the speed of working on a fashion collection compared to drawn-out architecture projects.

“We’re a younger studio and one of our biggest frustrations we find with architecture is that it’s just too slow,” said Zuspan. “A fashion design project that we designed and worked on for 2-3 months was very refreshing.”

Bureau V collaborated with design platform BYCO to produce the garments, which are now for sale. The collection was first shown last Thursday at the Dillon Gallery as part of New York Fashion Week.

Other architects that have tried their hand at fashion design include Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid and Oscar Niemeyer, who have all previously created shoe collections.

For more menswear, see Sruli Recht’s collection that features wooden clothes or check out giant accessories and oversized knitwear by Sibling.

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The designers also sent us the following info:

Bureau V’s capsule collection takes as its point of departure 19th century German architect Gottfried Semper’s Stoffwechseltheorie, a historical theory that describes how forms derived from material-specific practices often shift into other materials, creating valuable lingering forms that bear no material justification.

The collection expands upon this theory from material practices to utility at large. Taking extreme performance-driven forms (such as bicycle bib shorts and fisherman’s waders), the collection shifts both the clothing’s material and its context, removing much of the utility from the work, and thereby re-contextualising material formal artefact as sculptural gesture.

The collection is presented by BYCO, a tech-platform for design, which has an ongoing project to collaborate with designers to create work outside of their respective discipline.

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by Bureau V appeared first on Dezeen.