Exploding Fashion: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Twentieth Century Fashion. Alasdair O' Neill et al, Lannoo Publishing, 2022.

Exploding Fashion presents the outcome of a collaborative research project between fashion curators, theorists and dressmakers, led by Alistair O’Neill of Central Saint Martins, that ‘unpicks and pulls apart twentieth century fashion and then puts it back together in order to understand it better’. It is an audacious concept that takes single dress designs from five designers synonymous with the art of technical pattern cutting — Madeleine Vionnet, Charles James, Halston, Cristobal Balenciaga and Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) — and then reverse-engineers them, from the museum store, via the pattern cutting table, eventually to digital 3D animation. The results are recreations that may be worn by models and then captured in motion, better to comprehend the symbiosis between the living, breathing body and the dress, so difficult to retrieve once a garment is stored in an archival box, unworn and barely touched.