Coco Chanel and Le Corbusier: Analogies in Fashion and Architecture (1871–1939)

The building and the dress are both inhabitable immediate skins that differ in scale and materiality, yet they speak identical languages when it comes to their spatial relationship with the user.

In the pre-modern era, the traditional foundations of both fashion and architecture had dissolved. Art and culture proposed new exploratory frameworks, driven by practices of interaction among emerging disciplines. Through the explanatory medium of the exhibition, this tendency toward exchange and fusion is revealed—between industrial, plastic, cultural, sartorial, and architectural works.

In the presentation of the works of Coco Chanel and Le Corbusier, one finds a transcription of the conceptual repercussions of the era in question. A dialogue is proposed between Fashion and Architecture on accessible dwellings—in the relationship between production and inhabitation; transparent containers—in the relationship between form and interior space; and everyday materials—through the interplay between the works of Coco Chanel (“The Ford of Chanel” [1926], “Le charming chemise dress” [1916], and “The Romanov Pearl Necklace” [1922]) and the works of Le Corbusier (Pessac [1925], Maison Ozenfant [1922], and Urbanisation de la Ville d’Alger [1930]).