ABSTRACT
This paper highlights the broad character of architecture, an attribute normally associated with the construction of buildings whose essence encompasses the design logic found in many other traditional and emerging creative disciplines. Departing from the consideration of clothing as the architecture closest to the human body, the central theme of this research is the manipulation of this interface, while describing and analysing the challenge of covering a three-dimensional body from a two-dimensional perspective. The plain surface, conceived as the main format of human apparel, has been adapted through the centuries to its topographical irregularity by means of draping, piercing, fragmentation, mapping, parameterisation and interaction, being thus transformed into an increasingly more complex and perfect artificial skin. Furthermore, its design involves the consideration of variables such as size and scale, function and form, structure, material and construction, technique and tools. In short, clothing is an individual habitational architecture, a bodily limit that acts as a connection between the inner and outer self, the inherent and the foreign, the you and the I; a simultaneously specific and abstract filter; an interface in which clothing is the container and the body its content.
