At a glance, fashion and architecture are at polar opposites. Fashion is fast. Collections are conceived and created within weeks or months, trends change from season to season. Fashion moves. It shifts on the bodies of models walking fashion week runways, and it travels from factories in China, Turkey and Italy to shops and our high streets around the world.
Architecture, in contrast, is built to last. Buildings can easily take years to complete and they aren't typically designed to move.
Still, that's not to say that the two fields live in isolation of each other and that parallels can't be drawn. As the late French fashion designer Pierre Balmain once said, "Dressmaking is the architecture of movement."
Fashion and architecture have been in creative conversation since.
A view of the new tower at the Prada Foundation in Milan. Credit: Courtesy Fondazione
Sitting in OMA's latest addition to the foundation, an eight-story "torre" that overlooks the rest of the premises. just a few levels up from where the show will be held that evening, the successful and high-octane architect admits something unexpected. He's a little jealous of what the fashion industry has to offer.
"The beauty of a fashion show is that in a very short time you're confronted with a series of unique conditions that are all claiming attention and representing beauty and representing an idea ... as you look there's absolutely nothing else you can think of. So it's really unique, and that intensity of mobilization of your attention, that's something I almost envy."
Koolhaas is a strong defender of the discipline of fashion, noting there is "nothing frivolous about it."
"Architecture is a very old-fashioned profession that actually creates an endless series of prototypes of things that are never repeated. We're all working, spending time, and in a way wasting our time, creating unique conditions," he says.
"The beauty of fashion, on the contrary, is that. You make something sublime. If it's successful you repeat it and it becomes a kind of model that's endlessly reproduced. And that aspect of fashion is of course deeply impressive and serious."