Techno Fashion....

[what's up with those guys in the background, they share this opacity!]

What is the body of the future? Is it a visual form that we build towards, or is it an idea that forms the image?  Who's imagination determines the future body? What is it based on, what does it reference? 

According to the text, Twenty First Century Bodies, a revolution is taking place between the body and its material extensions, clothing in this case.   Once it was fashion that made a predominantly female audience surveillant of their own body forms, however, the artists and designers discussed in the text approach the fashion field with methods and ideas that begin to re-explore the relationships between body and clothing, giving the body's terrain authority over the evolution of what fashion can be.

When we discuss fashion, we can talk about it as if it were any casual material extention with a daily function, to protect, to disguise, to beautify, to criticize.  Fashion also bridges over to the ritual world, and then, becomes costume, which can also characterized by daily function.  Fashion is special, and normal.

Hussein Chalayman's work featured above, brings two casually functioning objects into the area of the body.  A table, and a skirt.  Individually, the two daily objects maintain their own separate relationships to the human being, as they function differently, the human body accesses these functional entities in different ways. By allowing two creations to exist as one on the human body, Chalayman gives a consolidation the ways in which humans interact in a space between themselves and their extentions.  If a woman decides to sit down at a table, she can simply take off her table skirt and set up.  Moreover, she can do it anywhere.  The table is no longer separate from the body.  It becomes part of the body; a detachable, occupying space as a human part, and then as its own as it is removed.  

Occupying space as multi-faceted objects, reconstructioning the relationship between the body and what lays outside of it...what else is the future body?  I recall the spacial and functional relations to a woman's being to begin before the 21st century.    For example, nomadic cultures are mobile, therefore, their casual objects must be as well.  Women carried babies in backpacks.  Perhaps Chalayman's table-skirt is not a new evolution of the relationship between body, object, and space, but rather a critical perspective of older ideas in the 21st century lens.  Although, his specialty is a nuance, because a skirt can also be a table, where a backpack functions as a mother's hold, it remains a backpack.  And still, with the function and space consolidated, what is the future body? Where are its current limits?