Architecture of Bodies, the Space and Forms of Fashion
Emanuele Coccia
Ever since Gottfried Semper’s reflections in the nineteenth century, architecture has claimed an original kinship with the textile arts. Before it was masonry, the wall was fabric and woven enclosure, and to build meant, first of all, to clothe. This intuition ran through many of the experimental movements of the twentieth century, beginning with Adolf Loos’s principle of cladding. Fashion, by contrast, has yet to take this proximity seriously. It still thinks of itself as surface, ornament and image, and rarely as the construction of space. Through the analysis of a number of contemporary creations, this lecture sets out to show that fashion is, in its own right, a form of architecture: the most intimate and the most mobile. Every garment is a minimal building. It is a threshold between inside and outside, a device that organises the relation between a body and the world and that moves with whoever inhabits it. To take this proximity seriously is to overturn the usual hierarchy. It is not fashion that must imitate architecture. It is architecture that must recognise in fashion its own original form, and perhaps its future: an architecture of bodies, nomadic and ephemeral, capable of dwelling without founding.
Emanuele Coccia is an Italian philosopher, living in Paris, where he is associate Professor at the École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). After earning his doctorate in medieval philosophy
and philology at the University of Florence, he dedicated his first studies to the figure of Averroes, and
his research then turned to the ontological status of images and their regulatory power, and to the
investigation of the nature of living beings. His books include Sensible Life, The Good in Things (on
advertising as moral discourse), and his best-known work, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture,
which has been translated into ten languages, followed by Metamorphoses and Philosophy of the
Home. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg from 2008–2011 and a visiting professor
at the universities of Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Düsseldorf, Columbia and Harvard. Beyond academia, he is
a columnist for Libération and collaborates with Le Monde and La Repubblica, has worked with artists
and institutions such as the Fondation Cartier’s 2019 “Trees” exhibition, and has recently written a fourhanded
work on fashion and philosophy with Alessandro Michele.