ABSTRACT
During the 2006 Paris Fashion Week, the Turkish Cypriot artist and fashion designer Hussein Chalayan resurrected ‘the ghost of fashion past’ with a groundbreaking and now iconic series of self-transforming robotic dresses (Blanks, 2006, p. 160). The grand nale of the catwalk show consisted of ve hand-constructed mechanical outts, which took the audience on a time travel through a hundred and eleven years of fashion history. The collection, entitled ‘One Hundred and Eleven’, started with a full-length, high-necked Victorian gown that transformed from a calf-length 1910s dress into a beaded apper dress from the 1920s. The following piece was a 1920s dress morphing into a 1930s and then a 1940s style silhouette. Then an hourglass dress reminiscent of Dior in the 1950s turned into a 1960s metallic sheath (Figure 5.1), and so on. As the show drew to a close, supermodel Leah De Wavrin entered the catwalk wearing a diaphanous dress that was slowly absorbed into a ying saucer of a hat. Paradoxically, Chalayan’s technological trip down fashion memory lane ended with an undressed model.
