Design exhibit loses its thread

In trying to show the link between fashion and architecture, MOCA's 'Skin + Bones' ends up feeling thin.

On the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, Frank Gehry had dinner at a
restaurant in Lower Manhattan with the Japanese fashion designer Issey
Miyake, for whom he'd just finished a boutique nearby, and Herbert
Muschamp, then the architecture critic for the New York Times. Gehry
and Miyake were just one of many creative pairs emerging from a new
collaboration between architecture and fashion. Muschamp was at the
height of his influence as a kingmaker in architecture.


But the terrorist attacks of the next day began a chain of
developments that exposed a fundamental myopia at the center of the
alliance between celebrity, fashion, architecture and the media. The
rebuilding process at ground zero slowed to a halt as celebrity
architects proved far better at proposing dazzling pieces of
architectural fashion for the site than forging productive links with
planners or politicians, and as Muschamp and other critics failed
entirely to clarify key issues for their readers. A similarly
disheartening process has unfolded in New Orleans since Hurricane
Katrina. And many of the buildings produced by the fashion-architecture
juggernaut — particularly Rem Koolhaas' Prada store in SoHo — now look
like gaudy relics of a distant, carefree age.