Body Architect – Vestoj

Losing Control

Dr Sean Trainor — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 10:06:53 +0000

MODERN AMERICAN MASCULINITY IS about mastery and control: control over one’s destiny and that of ‘lesser’ men and women. The late Notorious B.I.G. summarised this vision of manhood succinctly when he rapped ‘never lose, never choose to,’ but the same sentiment is manifest in a variety of pop cultural forms. Never mind that the imperative for mastery seems to emerge from outside of masculine men and women – that pop culture protagonists are impelled by a force that they themselves do not control. Unencumbered by this contradiction, John McClane and his kindred spirits seize control of Nakatomi Plazas all across the pages, screens, and stages of American cultural life.

This obsession with masculine control is nothing new. When thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies waged war against the British monarchy, General George Washington based his claim to authority in part on his self-mastery. Seemingly unflappable, and blessed with an unfailingly rigid mouth (a trait he carefully cultivated), Washington was believed to possess the discretion necessary to command men’s fates in war. After American independence, men like U.S. Senator Henry Clay (who coined the phrase ‘self-made man’) and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln were celebrated for willing their way to wealth and power, despite lowly origins. And, from slaveholding aristocrats to humble dirt farmers, early American men measured their manhood according to mastery. To be a fully-fledged adult white man in this age was to control ‘dependents:’ to own the resources that women, non-whites, and children needed to survive.¹

Masculine mastery and control were, at some level, patent fictions. Slaveholders would have gone bankrupt and poorer men starved without the labour of enslaved people, free women, and countless other ‘dependents.’ But, as is often the case, various forms of physical, legal and economic violence allowed men to avoid this basic reality – or, perhaps more accurately, to create the reality they desired. The lash, the law and the promise of inherited lands thus made real a degree of control that was otherwise perilously tenuous.

All this, by contrast, is why the nineteenth-century history of American and European men’s grooming is so interesting: because, in this realm, the reality of interdependence between men and their ‘dependents’ was so poorly disguised. Here, European and American men glimpsed the fateful possibility that they might not be in control of their bodies; that they might, in fact, owe more to the men who shaved their stubborn whiskers than those men owed to them. In response, they inaugurated a dramatic half-century of beard wearing – and endowed their newly-grown beards with the symbolic trappings of mastery. But try as its proponents might to disguise the beard’s origins, the style remained a child of fear: an implicit recognition of the very interdependence that masculinity seeks to deny.

Viewed from a distance of more than a century, the nineteenth-century beard fashion looks like a basic historical fact. For many observers, the succession of bearded and otherwise unremarkable U.S. presidents during the decades preceding 1900 is no more surprising than the fact that there are mountains in Switzerland. And yet the arrival of this fashion came as a great shock for those who lived through it. Sweeping much of Europe, North America, and Latin America after roughly two centuries of clean-shavenness, the beard movement was almost certainly the most dramatic development in nineteenth-century men’s fashion – every bit as shocking as if knee breeches and ruffled shirts were to once more become the dominant mode of men’s dress throughout the so-called ‘Western’ world.

The apogee of this trend, according to one scholar, arrived between 1870 and 1900. After carefully analysing more than a century’s worth of men’s images from the Illustrated London News, sociologist Dwight E. Robinson, writing in 1976, placed the twin peaks of the beard fashion – with roughly forty-five percent of all men’s images featuring a full beard – at roughly 1875 and 1895. Facial hair more generally, Robinson added, peaked around 1890, with approximately ninety percent of all men depicted in the News wearing a beard, moustache, or sideburns.²

While Robinson’s analysis remains the most exhaustive quantitative study of the nineteenth-century facial hair fashion, there is reason to doubt its accuracy. This is especially true for areas outside of Britain, which arrived at the facial fashion at different times and for different reasons. My own research, for instance, indicates that as early as 1865, roughly half of all general officers serving in the American Civil War sported a beard of some description, while only ten percent were clean-shaved.³

The precise trajectory of this trend, however, need not detain us here. Instead, what should concern us are the reasons for the beard’s popularity. These reasons, as is typical for nearly any fashion, are both varied and mysterious. To date, scholars of the nineteenth-century beard movement – including Christopher Oldstone-Moore, whose 2015 Of Beards and Men is the first rigorously-researched, book-length analysis of grooming trends from antiquity to present – have emphasised the way in which facial hair embodied and reflected larger ideals of the age.

For European Romantics and their American counterparts, according to Oldstone-Moore and others, facial hair reflected a larger fascination with both medieval aesthetics and the concept of nature. (Beards, notably, were a central feature of men’s grooming in the Middle Ages, and the bushy beard was presumed to be more ‘natural’ than the shaved face.) European and American imperialists, meanwhile, cherished the beard as emblematic of their own ostensible superiority to those with a limited capacity – real or imagined – for facial hair growth (usually Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans). And radicals of various stripes – including socialists, nationalists, abolitionists, religious extremists, and health reformers – adopted the beard to symbolise their rejection of the status quo. Health reformers, in particular, proved influential in this realm – arguing convincingly, though inaccurately, that the beard protected its wearers against tuberculosis and prevented men from inhaling particulate matter (no small thing for those living in the period’s coal-red cities or working in its dark satanic mills).⁴ All of these assessments of the beard fashion’s origins and meaning have much to recommend them. When nineteenth-century men, in both Europe and America, articulated why they chose to adopt the beard, they did so in precisely these terms – generating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pro-beard polemics repeating the foregoing claims. But these assessments of the facial hair fashion’s origins also ignore what may be its most interesting feature: the fact that, in important and fundamental ways, men throughout the Atlantic basin did not choose to adopt the beard. It was not, in other words, a style over which they exercised that quintessential masculine virtue: control.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the relationship between barber and patron throughout much of Europe and North America was not fundamentally different from many other service relationships. Patrons sought out barbers for a good shave – a task many men found too difficult or too unpleasant to perform for themselves in the era of the straight razor. Barbers sought out customers for their incomes. And, by a variety of means, customers pretended that they controlled the relationship from beginning to end. They were the ones who sought the barber’s patronage, after all. And, in any event, most barbers were low-status figures – poor whites in Europe, men of colour in America – over whom patrons exercised control outside the shop as well as in it.

Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, however, the relationship between barbers and patrons took a deleterious turn. Barbers, once seen at worst as mischievous schemers (like Beaumarchais’ Figaro) and more frequently as harmless, vapid chatterers, assumed a menacing cast. Indeed, during these years, patrons awakened en masse to the fact that barbers held deadly blades to their throats, and almost immediately began fantasising about the murderous possibilities of the barber shop. In the process, they grappled with the very real possibility that it was barbers, and not themselves, who controlled the act of grooming.

The most obvious example of these murderous fantasies was the story of Sweeney Todd. First told in the novel The String of Pearls, published serially between 1846 and 1847, the story of Sweeney Todd centers on a London barber who slashes unlucky customers’ throats, dispatches their bodies to a dungeon-like basement by means of a trap-door barber chair, and, with the help his co-conspirator Mrs. Lovett, transforms their lifeless corpses into delicious meat pies.⁵

Despite its patent ridiculousness, The String of Pearls proved immensely popular, inspiring a blockbuster theatrical adaptation and a raft of literary imitations. In the U.S., these imitations ranged from pulp drivel like ‘A Narrow Escape,’ a widely circulated tale in which an alcoholic enslaved barber murders a customer, to Herman Melville’s masterful ‘Benito Cereno,’ in which an enslaved mutineer named Babo quietly menaces his captor using a straight razor.⁶

Robert L. Mack, the leading scholar of Sweeney Todd, compellingly argues that these tales proved popular in the 1840s and 1850s because they spoke to larger fears about urban anonymity. In this light, The String of Pearls and its imitators are best understood, not as stories about a murderous barber, but as tales of a murderous stranger who claims the lives of unattached urban dwellers.⁷

Undoubtedly, there is much to recommend a broadly social interpretation of Sweeney Todd’s popularity and that of its imitators. Fears of urban anonymity were rampant throughout Europe and North America during this period, as individuals grappled with the rapid growth of vast, impersonal cities. In the U.S., meanwhile, where the Sweeney Todd character was, as suggested above, frequently replaced by a barber of colour, the story spoke to widespread white fears of black violence and dissimulation.

And yet Mack’s interpretation fails to take seriously the setting of these stories. While tales of tonsorial violence were important vehicles for exploring larger social anxieties, they were also, plainly and specifically, about the latent menace of the barbershop. How else can we explain the fact that, in the many tales inspired by Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber is rarely, if ever, replaced by another kind of blade-wielding tradesperson: a rampaging butcher, for instance, or an unhinged fish-monger?

Whether fears of gullet aggression inspired the story of Sweeney Todd or vice versa remains unclear. Most likely, the two were intimately intertwined. What is clear, however, is that Sweeney Todd, and the fears it embodied or inspired, had a dramatic effect on the history of men’s grooming. Across Europe and North America, a growing number of men abandoned the barbershop and took up shaving themselves. This was reflected, not just in the demographics of several major American cities, where the number of barbers shrank relative to the populations they served – a figure that indicated decreased demand for barbers’ services. It was also apparent in the comments of numerous commentators.⁸

In an 1860 article for the British publication The Albion, for instance, an anonymous writer reflects not only on the disappearance of barbers – their red and white poles ‘as scarce as good Madiera’ – but also on the menace of the shop. ‘I don’t mind … admitting honestly,’ the writer notes, ‘that I’m afraid of the barber … It is the hints, and inuendos [sic], and covert violence to which you are subjected that set my nerves in a utter. I wouldn’t mind if they’d assault you unmistakably and openly; you’d know what course to pursue under those circumstances.’ Instead, the barber, ‘by a gentle pressure of the thumb, forces your head into the most eligible position for being guillotined’ and ‘[beats you] with a couple of hard brushes about the head, ears, nose, and eyes till your head burns, your ears redden, your eyes smart, and your nose very nearly bleeds.’⁹

For men like the anonymous Albion author, the appropriate response to the terrors of the barber shop was clear: ‘I shave myself,’ the writer proclaimed. And so too, for the first time, did countless other men throughout Europe and North America during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Soon they discovered, however, that shaving was no simple task – that, despite unkindly estimates of barbers’ intelligence, the operation of shaving was, in fact, a difficult one. As a result of these first-time shavers’ incompetence, the act of shaving became a source of torment. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, in fact, complaints of pain became a constant refrain in articles on shaving – with roughly half of all American articles on the subject referencing pain or discomfort by 1850.¹⁰ These complaints, moreover, were exacerbated, not only by the primitive conditions in which many men shaved – without access, for instance, to warm water, decent shaving soap, large mirrors, or light – but also by the indifferent quality of the tools at their disposal. Thanks to a high American tariff, passed by a nationalistic U.S. Congress in 1842, top-notch continental razors suddenly jumped in price for American consumers. British and continental consumers, meanwhile, had to contend with lower-quality blades, as European manufactures compromised on quality to keep their wares competitive in U.S. markets.¹¹

The result of all this was that, by the late 1840s, a growing number of men were giving up on shaving altogether and letting their beards grow freely. As early as 1853, roughly one-in-eight New Yorkers, according to an informal survey by Scientific American, had adopted the style. And by the mid-1860s, as suggested previously, nearly half of European and American men had followed suit.¹²

During these years, and in the decades to follow, many men did their best to make the beard, and facial hair more broadly, symbols of masculine virtues. And, in many respects, they succeeded. Following a lengthy public relations campaign waged in newspapers, magazines and books, European and American proponents of the beard seemed to convince significant portions of their respective societies that the beard symbolised everything from patriarchal firmness and racial mastery to healthfulness and beauty. In the eyes of the public, then, facial hair appeared to be a style that men had freely chosen, and that reflected mastery and control: both of themselves and their bodies, and of the ‘lesser’ men and women whom they were charged with governing.

In point of fact, however, the beard was anything but. Instead, its deep history speaks to a fundamental loss of control: a fearful recognition of dependence on the part of European and American men; and a grim realisation that the body is, ever and always, the work of many hands.

Sean Trainor is a historian specialised in men’s fashion and grooming in nineteenth-century America. His book, Groomed for Power, is about the antebellum American beard movement.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Masculinities.’

See, for ex. S McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. ↩
D E Robinson, “Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1872,’ The American Journal of Sociology 81 (Mar., 1975), pp.1,133-1,141. ↩
See S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power: A Cultural Economy of the Male Body in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 2015), p.2. ↩
C Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2015; C. R. Oldstone-Moore, ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Studies 48 (Fall 2005), pp.7-34; Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 4. ↩
The String of Pearls has been republished as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Ed. R L Mack, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. ↩
For one of several versions of this tale, see ‘A Narrow Escape,’ Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), May 15, 1847; see also H Melville, ‘Benito Cereno,’ The Piazza Tales, New York, Dix & Edwards, 1856. ↩
R L Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, London, Continuum, 2007. ↩
S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ p.69. ↩
‘Barbers,’ The Albion 38 (Jun. 30, 1860), p.303. ↩
S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 1. ↩
Ibid., esp. Ch. 2. ↩
‘Bearded Civilizaton,’ Scientific American III (Jul. 9, 1853), p.342. ↩

Life In Colour: Red, Blue, Green and Yellow

Alice Hines — Thu, 11 May 2017 10:01:05 +0000

Takaharu and Yui Tezuka. Photograph by Yutaka Obara.

This article is the first in a series of interviews about dressing in monochrome.

ON THE FRONT OF Tezuka Architecture’s catalogue of work, the names of the firm’s principals, Takaharu and Yui, are written in contrasting colours: blue and red. Recently, I spoke to them in their home in Tokyo, Japan, via video call. It was a warm spring evening here, in New York City, and a bright morning there. As it happened, they were similarly arranged: Takaharu, on the left, in his signature cobalt, and Yui, on the right, in a cherry shirt that that looked plucked from the primary colour wheel.

Yui and Takaharu’s designs feature almost no colour. One project, the Roof House, is all sandy wood, topped with a sloping gray roof (each family member has a personal skylight, through which to ascend to the outdoor space). Their ‘Wall-less house’ has a ground story that’s entirely glass, filtering in whatever colours happen to be outside on the trees and in the sky. In their own lives however, colour is a defining characteristic. Yui wears almost exclusively red; Takaharu blue. The objects they share (car, furniture) are yellow. Their daughter, fourteen, wears yellow, too; their son, eleven, wears green.

The Tezuka family in their 1984 Citroën Deux Chevaux.

Alice: What were some of your early relationships to colour?

Takaharu Tezuka: It started from red.

Yui Tezuka: I loved red since I was very small. It suits me. And I didn’t wear pink. I guess pink is a symbol for girls, but I didn’t like it. Eventually, I quit wearing different colours and decided to wear just red.

Takaharu: I’ll tell you more. I used to work for an office called Richard Rogers’ Partnership. Richard Rogers is the architect who designed the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s of London. At that time, Richard Rogers was wearing blue. And everybody in the office was trying to wear blue, because everyone wanted to be like him. Richard Rogers himself didn’t like that solution. So he changed the colour to shocking pink, so that nobody could follow. But still, we stayed in blue.

And then, in 1992, I got married with a lady in red all the time. So eventually it became red and blue. And so, then, when we came back to Japan we found a car. A car in yellow, the yellow Citroën Deux Chevaux. And then, we decided that everything we have in common would be yellow. So that is how it started. It became certain in 1994, when we started our business in Japan.

Eventually, we had a daughter. That was much later, in 2002. And then because everything we share is supposed to be yellow, we made her into yellow. Still now, she loves yellow. Three years later we got a son. We were supposed to make him into yellow as well, but my daughter didn’t like to lose her colour. So she said, let’s give him green. Now we’ve got four colours.

Alice: What were their reactions as they got older? Do your children ever want to change their colours?

Takaharu: I think they’re quite happy about it.

Yui: Yeah. My daughter is quite happy about it. She doesn’t want to wear or have anything except yellow now.

Takaharu: And my son, he’s still wearing green. He doesn’t hate it. But he’s not as fond of green as my daughter is of yellow. But recently we bought a green suitcase, and he loves it.

Yui: Because my daughter is always wearing yellow, when she was in nursery school another child’s mother started to give me yellow clothes. When the mother bought yellow things to give her son, he didn’t want to wear it because it was the colour of our daughter.

Takaharu: And in class, everything yellow belongs to her. So she always gets a big portion, because many things are yellow. She gets a collection. And no one in the class wants to wear yellow, because it’s her colour.

Yui: It’s quite fun. Each of us having our own colours makes us have some kind of identity. I think it’s good. Makes our life easy and more fun.

Alice: Do you wear these colours head to toe? Or do you mix them with other colours?

Takaharu: Red, blue, red, blue, yellow, green – it doesn’t mean that everything is this colour. Underwear is white. [Laughs]. If everything is blue it becomes crazy!

Alice: Where are each of you from? I read your parents were architects.

Yui: I grew up next to Tokyo. And my father is an architect, and I grew up in a house which my father designed. I loved that very much. So I began to have interest in architecture. I decided to become an architect when I was sixteen.

Takaharu: I also grew up in Tokyo. And my father is an architect too, but working for big companies. And on both sides, my grandfathers were architects. Mother’s side, he wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to design his headquarters, but actually Frank Lloyd Wright was too old already. So he had to ask his apprentice to design his headquarters. We are very much a designer’s family.

Alice: Do your children want to be architects?

Yui: My daughter used to say she wanted to be an architect but she decided not to become that.

Takaharu: Yes, still!

Yui: Still, yes, there’s still some interest. But now she’s saying she wants to be a graphic designer.

Takaharu: Recently, a few years ago, she won a competition for school emblem. And the emblem is printed onto all kinds of cans, bags, everything. And she says she became proud of her graphic design.

Alice: I’m curious about how you two work together. What’s that process like?

Takaharu: We actually don’t separate projects. We do everything together. And ok, I do understand the structure aspect of architecture more. And I’m very good at drawing and making models. And my wife is very good at precising the models. So I work first, make it, then she comes with the knife and she cuts to the model I designed carefully. She gets a red pen and makes corrections on my drawing. That’s what she’s very good at.

I think it’s quite important to work together. If I’m alone I can’t decide if my design is the objective. But the way we work together we can make sure this is right or not. It’s a natural feeling. And working together helps that understanding.

Tezuka Architecture’s Echigo-Matsunoyama Natural Science Museum in Japan.

Alice: Does colour play a role in your designs?

Yui: We don’t use colour for our architecture because… how should I say it? The colour should be added with people.

Takaharu: We consider architecture as a kind of platform or a dish, for a nice cuisine. And if the dish is too colourful the cuisine doesn’t look good. So that’s the background. Architecture is quite the basic, natural colour.

Yui: In our lives, colour comes from us and also some things we pick like sofa and bed and accessories.

Alice: In any of the spaces you designed for others, have the people who inhabit or work in them adopted your philosophy on colour?

Takaharu: There are some families, for instance, one family who is in stripes all the time. But that’s nothing to do with us. They had that sense before they met us. So I don’t think our architecture changed their lifestyle. Our design is not to change, but to enhance their lifestyle. But maybe the stripes did become more consistent, after they met us.

Alice: Can I ask about any favourite coloured objects of yours?

Takaharu: A watch! It’s called a Swatch. I like this watch because it’s so basic.

Yui: I like dry material for T-shirts, that’s easy to clean. This shirt is my favourite. When I order, I order like, thirty or forty shirts of this.

Takaharu: For anything I like, the design must be simple. We say we’re like a dog. He’s always wearing the same thing. And in winter, our fur gets a little longer, so we’re wearing a sweater and jacket. And then we take it off, and inside is always the same as the summer.

Alice: How does a simple lifestyle impact your day-to-day routine? Or translate into other areas of your life or work more generally?

Takaharu: To separate the washing – it’s quite easy!

Yui: I don’t need to worry about what to wear every morning.

Takaharu: And the other thing is that people remember us quite easily. Even at my daughter’s school, they know me by colour. Blue father and red mother. And ok, our daughter is yellow. People want know more.

Takaharu: It’s the same thing as in this interview. People are curious.

Alice: What do you think the relationship is between clothing and architecture in general?

Takaharu: I can’t answer the question really, because architecture is a background. It’s better to be natural. But there’s one thing I can say. Architecture should be simple but at the same time it should be lively. So architecture is not black and white or red, often it’s neutral. The brown is natural. Sunlight coming in is cheerful. And in that way, it’s always written who lives there.

Yui: Our architecture has a kind of openness, to the environment. And to the people inside. All the rooms of the people inside can feel the openness to the people next to them and also to the nature.

Alice: If you didn’t wear blue or red, and you had to pick another colour which one would you pick?

Yui: If I have to quit my red? It’s quite difficult to think about. If I had to quit the red.

Alice: So you can’t think of one?

Yui: No, no.

Takaharu: Same me.

Yui: But when I don’t have the red shirt, when I feel cold, sometimes I wear blue.

Takaharu: I give her a blue sweater sometimes.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.

Technology at the Edge of the Body

Claire Van Den Berg — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 12:51:52 +0000

LUCY MCRAE IS A designer and filmmaker, and self-titled ‘Body Architect’ working with the boundaries of the human body and the dynamism of technology. Beginning her career in the innovation department at Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, she now runs her collaborative studio out of London. Best known for her innovative projects (particularly with Dutch designer Bart Hess), McRae works with the plasticity of technology for the body and how we engage with it aesthetically as well as functionally. Her work intermeshes and bleeds into fashion processes and practices with an altogether novel and unchartered approach.

McRae’s work often engages with the fashion industry, such as her collaboration with Bart Hess and Nick Knight on a shoot for Another Man in June 2010, as well as working with the likes of SHOWStudio, American Vogue, Levi’s and Bernhard Willhelm among others. Playful, sculptural, innovative, but at times dark and disconcerting; McRae works at the edges of the body and its image. In one such project, she developed a ‘Swallowable Parfum’ that the ‘wearer’ consumes in order to apply the scent that is excreted over the body through perspiration.

Claire: How do you see the evolution of the human body and its adornment considering its increasing amalgamation of technology – for instance bio-sensitive software or ‘body-tech’?

Lucy: There is so much going on in wearable technology; I’m looking at what comes after this. I recently met with NASA’s Space Biologist, Lynn Harper and she talked about how our bodies are inseparable to the environment we live in; the proteins in our body adapting minute to minute responding to the situation around us. There is a constant connection between the environment, architecture and the body; a really interesting trio between the three. I’m interested in redefining the limitations and boundaries of the body. My new project is exploring how the body will evolve – or potentially devolve – in altered gravity environments. I guess you could call it ‘life after wearable technology’. When you’re in zero gravity environment it’s like you’re underwater, so the body’s biological choreography is constantly changing. A lot of my projects are steered by complex scientific challenges; the narrative and concepts are borne from here, then I create these worlds in film.

My pursuits are not to predict the future. I use my work to project society and the evolution of humans into the future and wrap in a technological membrane. I call myself a ‘body architect’. Its a fabricated job title that won me a dream job at consumer electronics giant Philips eight years ago. The name stuck and has created an open platform, where I can explore and experiment without any preconceived ideas or expectations.

Claire: How important is collaboration to your work?

Lucy: I love to collaborate – I think if you work with people from different backgrounds, it brings a different energy and enables you to move forward expanding your capabilities and learning from others. It’s a big challenge and important that I work with people that complement my skills. When you can have a successful collaboration, it’s a wonderful capturing of energy.

Claire: You are often featured in fashion magazines, for instance your work with photographer Nick Knight for Another Man in 2010, among others. How does your work fit in with traditional fashion processes, and how does your studio practice engage with the fashion industry?

Lucy: My projects are always loosely related to fashion. I’m not in the fashion world, but strongly believe we have entered into a future of the hybrid. I think we’re always swarming in other people’s research and I like that it’s blurry and not clear-cut. Different people interpret my work in different ways; when Bart and I started to do Lucy & Bart, it was very much misunderstood. People thought it was gross and grotesque, there were these wonderful, critical comments, like ‘this isn’t fashion’. Two years later people started to get it. I like the fact that we were hunting further ahead of our time, that it was misunderstood.

Claire: Is this a realm you consciously engage with?

Lucy: I’m interested in the concept of the second skin, and using the skin as a canvas to propagate innovation and the body is always the starting point. My short film ‘Make Your Maker’ looks at how technology is absorbed trans-dermally and excreted through the skin. If we’re talking about the body, then we refer to identity, which is a direct link to fashion. All these aspects weave into the body, so when I do something I’m not trying to make a statement about a certain area, it’s more an enquiry, using my work as an antennae, in response to whats going on around me.

Claire: Do you then work with a potential in mind to expand on or improve aspects of fashion and the ways in which we engage with it?

Lucy: Well, for the Swallowable Parfum, I took the concept that in fifteen to twenty years time we will be able to reprogram our biology away from disease and ageing. The product takes the form of a cosmetic pill that you consume and the fragrance excretes through the skin’s surface, redefining the potential of the body and giving a new function to skin. For Swallowable Parfum, the body becomes a sort of atomizer; expanding from the inside to the exterior of the body, emitting a cloud of scent around the silhouette.

Claire: Your work obviously spans many disciplines, from architecture, science and sculpture to fashion and technology. How would you describe your individual, idiosyncratic style that lies at the core of all this?

Lucy: In a weird way many of my projects, unconsciously, come out quite dark and visceral. For example, ‘Make your Maker’ was filmed in an Amsterdam basement and it sort of brought in elements of death. With my work I never know what it is going to look like in the beginning, the experiments and processes eventually define the final outcome. In the past it has been described as ‘grotesquely beautiful’. And that is certainly not what I aim to do in the beginning, but it just happens due to do the materials I work with. It’s often a very biological process. I am taking the viewer into another world, hovering in an atmosphere not yet real. That’s what really excites me: dreaming up these possibilities.

Claire: And what about the idea of a cyborg, that we as human beings are increasingly merging with technology? Is technology increasingly becoming a second skin?

Lucy: I think that it is important that technology is organic and inclusive. I like to explore high-tech scenarios, but I use very low-tech ways of presenting it. Technology is becoming increasingly smaller, and will come in liquid form. We’re going to bathe in it, swallow it, eat it, wash our hair with it. I treat technology as a membrane and I treat the skin as a canvas for technology.

All images of Lucy McRae and Bart Hess’ collaboration with photographer Nick Knight for Another Man magazine, 2010.

Claire Van Den Berg is a writer and editor based in Berlin.