Fashion is, some would argue, an inferior craft compared to the so-called weightier, intellectual and preeminent discipline that is akin to architecture. Fashion garners a lot of criticism as it breeds on society’s prevailing and questionable values of kitsch, consumerism, profit, fame and self-promotion. However, this thesis argues that fashion is boundless, pervasive and omnipresent. Fashion is irrepressible.

 

Culture is inevitably determined by its economy, therefore, it is safe to say that architecture has also become subservient to the goals of the capitalist economy... so why is there such a big consumer society conundrum? How can the commodification and spectacle of architecture be used to expose, embrace and submit to the corporate, commercial, narcissistic but pleasurable realm of fashion?

 

Fashion haunts all debates and discourses about modern architecture. The very gesture of excluding fashion is so institutionalized that fashion becomes a vital part of the system and its exclusion defines architecture itself. The contretemps between the two disciplines is tangled and folded over on itself in a series of knots and this convolution is what provides the frame of the discourse in this thesis.

 

Narcissism is a popular descriptor used for socialites and has a derogatory stamp, but the very people whom we label narcissistic are those who attract as well as repel. This project accentuates the narcissism that is pervasively entrenched in the fashion society. A theatrical, grandiose and fantastical three-dimensional consumer experience is proposed that stresses the enjoyment in shopping itself as a means of enthusiastic fantasy and escape even as it makes apparent the dilemmas of narcissism.

 

Collage is employed as an artistic, analytical mechanism to design, assemble and produce an interpretation of the process and the envisioned product. The interior will be dominated by a wild, dynamic and sculptural central element that offers a grandiloquent public catwalk as circulation. The project is situated on Degraves Street; a short, narrow laneway that runs north from Flinders Street to Flinders Lane in the CBD of Melbourne, Australia. The site expresses a rich, playful, eccentric and quirky vibe epitomizing Melbourne’s laneways. The design articulates the ostentatious exhibitionism embedded in the fashion world and questions our society’s self-centredeness, superficiality and vanity. However, with the aid of a (my) narrative of a (self-proclaimed) modern day journalist/blogger, this thesis aims to both exploit and embrace the fashion for what it is.