What do architects and fashion designers have in common? They both create artworks that people can live in. Chanel once said: “Fashion is architecture; it is a matter of proportions”. And she was right.
In the 1960s, the avant-garde group Archigram redefined design with the visionary Suitaloon and Cushicle projects. They transformed buildings into inflatable garments, collapsing the line between clothing and shelter. Though never realized, these concepts foreshadowed decades of daring experiments at the crossroads of fashion and architecture.
Zaha Hadid went further still. Her futuristic NOVA shoe for United Nude — a 16.5 cm heel of fiberglass and metallic rubber, felt more like a building in motion than footwear. Beyond shoes, she left her mark on Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Bvlgari, proving that no element was too small for architectural reinvention, from a handbag handle to a touring pavilion.
Others have followed. Ma Yansong translated his flowing silhouettes into Fendi accessories. Virgil Abloh, trained in civil engineering and architecture, reinvented Louis Vuitton menswear with Bauhaus-inspired clarity. Meanwhile, fashion houses increasingly stage collections inside architectural landmarks — Louis Vuitton at Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, Dior at Blenheim Palace, turning architecture into fashionable spaces.
From Pierre Balmain’s dictum that “dressmaking is the architecture of movement” to Thierry Mugler’s sculptural couture, the message is clear: architecture builds the spaces we inhabit, while fashion constructs the spaces we wear.
The influence flows both ways: if architects sometimes design clothes, many fashion designers think like architects. Both disciplines share a fascination with space, structure, and form, translating ideas of shelter and scale into patterns, textures, and silhouettes.
Few embody this dialogue as powerfully as Hussein Chalayan, whose Convertible Skirt/Table of the 1990s turned clothing into furniture with a single gesture. His work, displayed in museums like Somerset House and the Design Museum, is studied as seriously as architectural drawings.
Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, is often hailed as an “architect of clothes.” Her abstract silhouettes distort the human form, much like architecture manipulates spatial perception.
Yohji Yamamoto brought architectural sensibility to tailoring. Fusing Japanese tradition with radical cuts, he created garments celebrated as much for their design mastery as their wearability. His 2012 retrospective at Ron Arad’s Design Museum Holon placed his pieces in dialogue with the museum’s curved architecture. “Conflicts and harmonies between my work and those of architects are interesting to me,” he said.
At the frontier is Iris van Herpen, fashion’s great futurist. Famous for 3D-printed couture, she has collaborated with architects like Niccolò Casas and Julia Koerner, producing garments that resemble crystalline facades or kinetic structures. Her pieces move with the body yet behave like architecture — responsive environments in miniature.
And Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton approaches architecture through staging. His runway shows unfold in icons like Oscar Niemeyer’s Niterói Museum in Brazil, Bob Hope’s futuristic Palm Springs estate, and I. M. Pei’s Miho Museum in Japan.
“People travel for architecture,” he told Vogue. “Louis Vuitton should reflect that same spirit of exploration.”
Some collaborations between architects and fashion houses have gone beyond one-off experiments, evolving into enduring creative partnerships that continue to shape both fields.
Take Frank Gehry and Louis Vuitton, a relationship that began in 2014 with the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Since then, Gehry’s hand has appeared across handbags, perfume bottles, and store concepts, each project blurring art, architecture, and luxury. Their bond was spotlighted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023, where Gehry unveiled a limited-edition series of 11 Capucines handbags. Interpreted through four themes — Architecture and Form, Material Exploration, Animals, and Twisted Box, the bags were not mere accessories but precious collectible sculptures. A year later, the partnership lit up Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais, where Gehry’s monumental White Fish Lamp illuminated the palace’s Balcon d’Honneur, accompanied by wooden arches riffing on his signature geometries. It was architecture scaled down, yet no less spectacular.
If Gehry brings sculptural gravitas, Rem Koolhaas and Prada exemplify how architecture and fashion can evolve together. Beyond reimagined backpacks, Koolhaas’s OMA transformed a former Milanese distillery into the Fondazione Prada in 2015 — a sprawling cultural complex that blurred boundaries between art, design, and commerce. Their collaboration extends to stores, books, and stage sets, forging an ongoing dialogue that has made Prada synonymous with architectural daring.
No designer embraced this interplay more wholeheartedly than Issey Miyake. Known for treating space as an extension of fabric, Miyake turned his boutiques into architectural laboratories. From Shiro Kuramata’s early Tokyo interiors in the 1970s to Frank Gehry’s origami-like Tribeca store decades later, his showrooms offered architects a global platform. Collaborators included David Chipperfield, Toshiko Mori, and Gordon Kipping, each translating Miyake’s pleats and folds into spatial form. In 2007, Issey Miyake worked with Tadao Ando to create 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, a freestanding museum in Tokyo's Midtown.
Zaha Hadid, too, saw fashion as a natural canvas for her futuristic vision. She created the Chanel Mobile Pavilion, a 700-square-meter traveling exhibition space. Touring from Hong Kong to New York before reaching its final home at Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe, the pavilion was conceived as a tribute to Chanel’s legacy. Inside, vaulted forms, translucent ceilings, and sculpted light created an artificial landscape where art and fashion converged.
A younger generation of architects has followed suit. Oki Sato, founder of the Tokyo-based studio Nendo, approaches design with playful minimalism that has charmed fashion houses from Louis Vuitton to Hermes and COS. His 2013 collaboration with Louis Vuitton produced the Surface Lamp for the brand’s Objets Nomades line — a portable, sculptural piece that nodded to Vuitton’s travel heritage. For Sato, the smallest design detail could tell a bigger story, and his whimsical touch brought intimacy and humor to the world of luxury fashion.
These examples show how deeply entwined the disciplines have become. For fashion designers, collaborating with architects offers gravitas, permanence, and a new way to stage identity. For architects, fashion provides immediacy and intimacy, a chance to shrink monumental ideas into objects worn, carried, or experienced on a human scale.
At their core, fashion and architecture begin with the human body. One shelters it; the other adorns it. Both balance function and form, and both tell stories, whether it’s a skyline or a silhouette. As Maison Margiela once noted: “The most important similarity between fashion and architecture is that they share the same starting point: the human body.”
Sustainability has become their shared frontier. Architects experiment with adaptive reuse and energy efficiency, while designers embrace upcycling and circular design. Together, they create recyclable pop-up shops or garments crafted from repurposed building materials, like Bjarke Ingels Group’s modular stores for Ganni or Lina Ghotmeh’s eco-minded projects with Hermès.
Technology further binds them. Parametric modeling in architecture inspires couture’s 3D-printed dresses; adaptive buildings mirror smart textiles that respond to wearers. As digital tools evolve, the line between inhabitable and wearable design grows thinner.
Cultural exchange deepens the dialogue. Western architects borrow from Asian textiles; Asian designers echo modernist minimalism. Arabian architecture also leaves its imprint: the Mashrabiya, a traditional lattice window balancing privacy and beauty, has inspired lace-like fabrics, laser-cut leather, and filigree jewelry. Unlike contemporary architecture, which often renames it as “geometric panels,” fashion preserves its heritage, turning the Mashrabiya into a symbol of cultural storytelling.
These parallels point toward a future where fashion and architecture merge into a global, experimental, and profoundly human experience.
While architecture is art on the scale of cities, fashion is art on the scale of bodies. Together, they blur categories, provoke awe, and redefine how we inhabit space and express identity. At the heart of this union lies storytelling. Buildings narrate culture and history, garments reveal the identities of wearers and makers alike. This shared narrative instinct keeps the dialogue alive, pushing both fields to collaborate, innovate, and expand the very idea of what design can be.
