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Andrea Zittel: A-Z Garments Series

by John McGee

"Andrea Zittel: A-Z Garments Series" exhibition view (Images courtesy Gallery Side 2)

It would be easy to mistake Gallery Side 2 for a chic boutique—hand-painted clothing ads hang on the wall and six wool felt sleeveless dresses and a biker chick reverse vest fill the middle of the space. But this is not the latest fall fashion, it's American artist Andrea Zittel's first Tokyo exhibition. 

Zittel, 37, says that the clothes in this show—officially, Handmade Pressed Fiber Uniforms, part of the A-Z Advanced Technologies series—are the natural terminus to a 10-year "conceptual and technical evolution towards an increasingly direct way of making something." In 1991, the artist started by designing a series of "perfect" dresses that she could wear for six months at a time (A-Z Six-Month Uniforms). She progressed to Russian Constructivist-inspired items using only rectangles of fabric (A-Z Personal Panel Uniforms). Moving from woven textiles to yarn, she crocheted her own Single Strand Uniforms. For her Handmade Stranded Uniforms, she retired the crochet hook and developed a way to knit using just her fingers. The newest felt garments forsake yarn for unspun fibers. 

Andrea Zittel: A-Z Garments Series

The Uniforms series is one part of Zittel's diverse, design-based retooling of property, housing, interior design and fashion. Where design finds solutions to immediate problems, however, Zittel researches the socio-cultural drives that guide design, leading to experiments with contemporary ideas of isolation, independence and personal limits. 

Zittel is no lifestyle guru. She is Martha Stewart seduced by Buckminster Fuller. Her primary base is in the California desert, not Connecticut. She prefers Bauhaus to House and Garden and survival in the outback, not just the backyard. Over the past 10 years or so, she and her small factory of assistants have turned out a range of products—self-contained desert islands, customized chill spaces, and consumer goods like clocks and sofas—for Documenta and other major international exhibitions. 

The artist started making the felt dresses this spring. "I wanted to make a dress out of fabric, but as a form without cutting and sewing," says Zittel. Her three-day process involves layering Australian merino wool fibers in hot water and soap, pounding, soaking, shrinking and tightening the fibers until they form the characteristic mat of felt. At the same time, she forms the fabric into simple, strapped tubes. She uses dyed wools for the different colors—deep green with a spreading white spine up the front, rusty red with rising white and gray flame patterns, and solids of pink and white. To create the golf ball-sized, Swiss cheese holes punched through the skirts, she leaves the wool thin in some areas and, as the fabric dries, it pulls apart. 

Andrea Zittel: A-Z Garments Series

In the final step, the tube shapes are cut up the back, yielding a single piece of fabric you slide on like an extra-thick Japanese housewife apron. The open-backed dresses fasten with two oversized safety pins (the artist recommends wearing a slip underneath). Though the fit is somewhat flexible, they come in one tall, thin size—Zittel's. 

Like the artist's other projects, the felt clothes satisfy a basic need of civilized living (public nudity is still taboo) and also question assumptions about its implementation (why cover yourself with brands, not buckskin?). Expressing a typical American reverence for self-sufficiency, Zittel says that her clothing is an alternative to corporate fashion. "The clothes I make are better than what I can buy in a store," she says.

The Andrea Zittel: A-Z Garments Series exhibition was held Sept-Oct 2002 at Gallery Side 2 in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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