Architecture and Fashion: Two Disciplines, One Language
Dedicated to the great architect Frank Gehry,
who left us in December 2025 at the age of 96
Architecture and fashion have long shared a vocabulary: proportion, structure, the art of draping. Both disciplines emerged from humanity's most ancient impulses: to shelter the body, to signal belonging, to transform the mundane into the meaningful. Today, as cities vie for distinctive silhouettes and couture houses commission landmark buildings from star architects, the dialogue between these spheres resounds with particular clarity. From Frank Gehry's titanium-clad museums to Virgil Abloh's structural approach to clothing, the boundary between disciplines has dissolved. Askar Ramazanov, managing partner of Askar Inc. and founder of the urban platform City Circle, examines how architects 'dress' cities while designers conceive load-bearing silhouettes.
The beginning of human history can be traced to the first manifestations of art: cave paintings and the earliest ornaments (a truth one grasps viscerally when visiting Jean Nouvel's Louvre Abu Dhabi). The emergence of architecture and adornment marks one of humanity's most ancient milestones: without these, without the act of gifting ornaments to one another, the leap in development that made us truly human rather than merely animal might never have occurred. As societies grew, the need for settlements and cities arose. Architecture became essential to reflecting social structures and interactions.
Which came first, the building or the garment? The question itself reveals the ancient kinship between architecture and fashion. Both disciplines emerged alongside humanity's earliest social structures: constructing shelter and creating adornment were among the first acts that distinguished us from other creatures. Anthropologists note that the gifting of ornaments was one of the first social rituals, a gesture that helped transform groups of individuals into communities, and communities into civilisations.
Since those primordial times, architecture and fashion have evolved in parallel, sharing a common vocabulary: structure, proportion, surface, texture, materiality. As Coco Chanel famously declared:
Fashion is architecture; it is a question of proportions. Her thought, recorded by biographer Marcel Haedrich in 1971 and later disseminated by Vogue, crystallises what practitioners in both fields have long understood: they share a fundamental concern with clothing human experience, whether at the scale of the body or the city. Hubert de Givenchy would later call Cristóbal Balenciaga, the architect of haute couture, the highest compliment one discipline can pay another.
The Social Architecture of Status
Throughout history, both spheres have served as instruments of social distinction, whilst knowledge of them has marked cultural refinement. In ancient civilisations, magnificent temples and palaces were the exclusive preserve of rulers and priests, whilst precious fabrics and exquisite ornaments marked the elite. The Industrial Revolution democratised both: architecture became a public affair as libraries, theatres, museums and department stores opened their doors to all. Fashion underwent an analogous transformation, evolving from aristocratic privilege into a mass industry.
Yet even in our democratic age, both spheres retain the power to signal cultural sophistication rather than mere wealth. A building, like clothing, speaks: sometimes of power, sometimes of refinement, always of values. The 2006 exhibition Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture at Los Angeles's MOCA became the first major museum show to explore these connections in depth.
In architecture and design, there exists the expression 'on fashion', something too trendy that will quickly become dated. Perhaps this expression fundamentally distinguishes architecture from fashion. Architecture is built for decades, sometimes centuries; it shapes the mindset of citizens, exerting a far deeper influence than might appear. Fashion operates at different velocities. Cities and architecture undoubtedly influence it. This largely explains why architects are drawn to the fashion industry: luminaries like Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, as well as experimental visionaries such as Neri Oxman and Junya Ishigami.
Icons of Identity: Norman Foster and Highrise Urban Fashion
If cities possess wardrobes, Norman Foster has been their most prolific tailor. For over half a century, Foster + Partners has dressed world capitals in distinctive silhouettes. The HSBC Building transformed Hong Kong's skyline; 30 St Mary Axe, known as the Gherkin, became London's most recognisable profile; the newest JPMorgan Chase headquarters with its contemporary Gothic buttresses continues this legacy of singular structures even in hyper-developed Manhattan.
A famous photograph from the 1931 Beaux-Arts Ball captured New York architects arriving in costumes of their buildings. Leonard Schultze came dressed as the Waldorf-Astoria, showcasing the hotel's innovation and Art Deco style. William Van Alen appeared as the Chrysler Building: his cape echoed the skyscraper's lift door designs, a four-foot crown with a spire rising from his head. A. Stewart Walker represented the Fuller Building, Ely Jacques Kahn the Squibb Building, Ralph Walker a Wall Street tower. The event became a vivid emblem of the Art Deco era, when architects, like artists, embodied their creations.
The wave of Manhattanism, embraced by world cities including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, led to a homogenisation of urban silhouettes. This intensified competition for distinctiveness and identity, for recognisability. And it was precisely here that Norman Foster dressed more than fifteen world capitals across six continents in unmistakable architectural costumes. By contrast, the equally prolific Rem Koolhaas, author of the very term 'Manhattanism', articulated in his seminal book Delirious New York (1978), is remembered for only one truly memorable building: the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing. This skyscraper, folded into a continuous loop, defies both gravity and the logic of verticality, yet remains the sole recognisable silhouette in the architect's portfolio. Foster, meanwhile, has created an entire galaxy of urban icons.
Curiously, Moscow remains one of the few major cities where Foster's vision never materialised. Despite numerous proposals (Russia Tower, the new Central House of Artists, the Zaryadye project), none were realised. Yet dozens of cities worldwide bear Foster's architectural signature, and each building functions precisely like fashion: creating instant recognition, projecting the aspirations of its inhabitants and businesses, defining identity.
Nature as Teacher: From Imitation to Integration
Architecture and clothing have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. The capitals of ancient Egyptian columns shaped like maize cobs, the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order in Greek temples, the botanical profusion of Art Nouveau: each era translated botanical forms into stone, copper or metal. But Japanese architect Junya Ishigami proposes a more radical relationship.
Ishigami's retrospective, titled Freeing Architecture, was held at Paris's Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in 2018. The exhibition presented twenty projects through maquettes, models, videos and drawings, revealing his pursuit of free, delicate and unconventional architecture. At the 2008 Venice Biennale, Ishigami's Japanese Pavilion manifested architecture that doesn't merely imitate nature but becomes its scaffold: buildings designed as forests for living systems, structures inviting the landscape to reclaim them.
These very principles can already be observed in the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, designed by the Dutch architectural firm Mecanoo under Francine Houben's leadership. The museum, which opened in November 2025 at Saadiyat Cultural District, evokes natural rock formations: pixelated white concrete forms with pentagonal structures referencing cellular patterns. As Mecanoo partner Nuno Fontarra stated: “This building is not merely a container; it is a storyteller in its own right.”
This ecological thinking resonates with the work of Neri Oxman, founder of MIT's Mediated Matter group and pioneer in Material Ecology. Her celebrated maxim: “The arc begins with nature-inspired design and ends with design-inspired nature. From childhood, we were taught to see nature as an untouchable mother. But now she has become our child; it is our job, our responsibility, to mother the natural world.”
The fashion industry can embark on this journey before architecture. A prime example is Stella McCartney, who twenty years ago brought conscientiousness to the fashion industry as the first luxury house never to use leather, feathers, fur or skins. Today the brand goes further: in 2022, Stella McCartney unveiled Frayme Mylo, the world's first luxury handbag made from mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi. The Mylo material, developed by Bolt Threads, is grown in a laboratory within days from air, water and mulch, and rivals the look and feel of animal leather. The Mylo Consortium now includes Adidas, Lululemon and Kering (owner of Gucci). As McCartney's manifesto declares:
Abu Dhabi: Where Architecture Meets Couture
Nowhere does the convergence of architecture and fashion manifest more clearly than on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island. The Saadiyat Cultural District projects were long in construction, but by 2026 they can be seen in their completed form. This district offers Abu Dhabi a considerable advantage: the chance to become a new Venice as a cultural and financial centre of the world. Such were the cities that once passed the baton: from Venice to Amsterdam, London, New York and Hong Kong. If Abu Dhabi continues to invest in culture with such vision, it will become a rightful global arbiter of architecture. This is precisely what we shall witness in the coming decades: the most powerful fashion brands will shoot their campaigns at Saadiyat Cultural District.
Foster's Zayed National Museum references the region's ancient pearl-diving heritage: shells rising from the desert like memories of maritime wealth, ascending towards new heights. The building evokes a broad spectrum of associations: pearl nets or shells holding the pearls that once adorned empresses, their gowns studded with thousands of luminous spheres traded along the Silk Road. Pearl harvesting shaped costume traditions from Byzantium to Slavic cultures, Egypt, India and China. Foster's museum creates an icon as memorable as the Sydney Opera House, yet lighter and more contemporary in form.
Nearby, Jean Nouvel's Louvre Abu Dhabi filters sunlight through a latticed dome of thousands of perforated elements, creating what the architect calls a 'rain of light', an effect recalling the mashrabiya screens that have shaped Islamic architecture and textile patterns for centuries. And Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, perhaps his largest and most powerful work (which opens its doors this year), the master's final statement, represents the apotheosis of Saadiyat Cultural District's architecture.
History teaches us: every golden age, every flourishing of a financial and cultural centre, be it Medici Florence, seventeenth-century Amsterdam or postwar New York, has given birth to great artistic treasures. Wealth concentrated in one place inevitably attracts talent and ambition, transforming into patronage, and patronage into art that outlives its creators by centuries. One hopes that Abu Dhabi and the Emirates will seize their golden moment to the fullest, and produce something extraordinary that will enter the annals of world art. Perhaps this will be reflected in the fashion industry as well: it is here that new codes of luxury may be born, new names, a new visual language that will define the coming era.
Gehry: Architecture as Frozen Couture
If architecture is frozen music, Frank Gehry's buildings are frozen garments of titanium and glass: structures seemingly caught in motion, draped over function like fabric over form. The software developed by his office borrowed directly from aerospace and film industries, creating what Bradley Quinn called parametric couture at urban scale.
The Bilbao Effect, the phenomenon whereby a single building can transform a city's destiny and global recognition, reveals architecture's capacity to function like fashion: creating desire, signalling arrival, generating cultural capital. Hans Ulrich Obrist, senior artistic adviser at Luma Arles, recalls how Maja Hoffmann invited Gehry for the Provence project. At the Solaris Chronicles exhibition, whilst the building was still under construction, Gehry proposed making the architectural maquettes dance. Tino Sehgal developed the choreography, and Pierre Boulez, in his nineties, composed the soundtrack. Gehry once mused: 'If architecture is frozen music, is music liquid architecture?'
It is no coincidence that LVMH commissioned Gehry for the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The building of twelve glass sails, functioning simultaneously as art museum and brand statement, has become an architectural icon of the twenty-first century. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the most massive museum at Saadiyat, shows that each building in the district, like a costume or a standalone architectural island, displays the master's worldview on exhibiting the cultural achievements of our civilisation.
OMA and Prada: Twenty-Five Years of Runway Revolution
Since 1999, the collaboration between Rem Koolhaas's OMA/AMO and Prada has revolutionised the very format of the fashion show. What began as retail architecture (the Epicenter stores in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo) evolved into a remarkable creative partnership where architecture serves fashion not as permanent monument but as ephemeral event. The Deposito Prada became a blank canvas for seasonal experimentation. Each show exists for mere hours, yet represents the quintessence of architectural possibility: auditoriums divided by walls with doors through which models appear only fleetingly; two-storey steel houses with corridor-runways; asphalt roads with polystyrene automobiles. As OMA architect Giulio Margheri explains, the contribution is theoretical rather than visual: mood and direction matter more than specific images.
But Prada expands its universe far beyond the runway. Fondazione Prada in Milan, designed by OMA and opened in 2015, comprises 19,000 square metres on the site of a 1910s distillery. Koolhaas combined seven existing buildings with three new structures: the Podium pavilion, a cinema and the 60-metre Torre. The Haunted House, clad in 24-carat gold leaf, became the complex's signature. As Koolhaas stated: “Fondazione is neither a preservation project nor new architecture. Two conditions usually kept separate here confront each other in a state of permanent interaction.”
From Runway to Room: Fashion's Architectural Turn
The movement flows both ways. Hussein Chalayan, the Cypriot-British designer, has devoted his entire career to dissolving the boundary between clothing and furniture, body and building. His legendary Afterwords collection of 2000 transformed four chair covers and a coffee table into dresses, work inspired by refugees forced to carry their belongings on their backs. Architecture schools now use his work as teaching material.
Alexander McQueen, staging his Dante collection in Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church Spitalfields, understood that architecture could amplify fashion's emotional impact: the Baroque interior transformed his Gothic collection into genuine theatre. Issey Miyake was a profoundly architectural fashion designer, inspired by traditional Japanese costume and technology, often referencing origami. His pleating technology represents a revolution in understanding the relationship between thread, fabric and form. Miyake collaborated with Tadao Ando on the 21_21 Design Sight gallery in Tokyo, a space where fashion and architectural thinking merge into a unified experience.
Zaha Hadid: From Buildings to Bodies
Zaha Hadid's practice showed that the transition between scales, from jewellery to buildings, constitutes a single research process. Her collaborations spanned the entire fashion industry: footwear for Melissa in 2008, Lacoste in 2009 and United Nude in 2013; a sculptural bag for Louis Vuitton in 2006.
Particular attention deserves the Mobile Art Pavilion for Chanel, a travelling exhibition space commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld in 2007. The pavilion, inspired by Chanel's quilted 2.55 handbag, toured Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York before finding a permanent home in Paris at the Institut du Monde Arabe. The 180-tonne structure of steel and fabric could be assembled in under a week, transported each time in more than fifty containers. Lagerfeld said of Hadid: 'She is the first architect to have found a way to part with the dominating post-Bauhaus aesthetic. The value of her designs is similar to great poetry.'
Hadid's style became as recognisable as that of specific fashion brands: her fluid curves translated with ease from concert halls to clutches. The two-year collaboration between Zaha Hadid Design and Odlo produced Futureskin, a base layer for winter sports featuring body-mapping technology that allows clothing to adapt to breathing and movement: architectural thinking applied directly to the clothed body.
Virgil Abloh: The Architect Who Dressed the World
Perhaps no one better embodied the fusion of architecture and fashion than Virgil Abloh. Having received his architectural education at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the school shaped by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh brought structural thinking to his work at Off-White and Louis Vuitton. In his show notes, he wrote simply: 'Mies is my other Michael Jordan.'
His 2021 collection for Louis Vuitton featured puffer jackets with three-dimensional models of the Eiffel Tower and skyscrapers: literal architecture worn on the body. The show itself paid homage to Mies's Barcelona Pavilion, with an abstract city of green marble as the set. At Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Abloh declared: “Young architects can change the world without building buildings.”
His Efflorescence furniture collection for Galerie Kreo drew inspiration from Brutalist architecture; his project for Vitra reimagined the domestic future through the lens of Jean Prouvé. And his collection for IKEA (2019) made high design accessible: fifteen pieces from chair to WET GRASS rug to a backlit Mona Lisa at 1:1 scale. The unforgettable architectural passages in Louis Vuitton boutiques, monumental sculptures and bold colour play, will hardly be replicated. Abloh understood what ancient cultures knew instinctively: the materials we use for shelter and for clothing spring from a single human impulse towards protection and expression.
Walking into the Future: Wellness, Technology and the New City
We stand at the threshold of a great reversal. The construction boom of the 2020s and 2030s is creating new technological possibilities; a transport revolution is coming. Autonomous vehicles and robotisation will return cities to pedestrian scale. This is not nostalgia: it is a new philosophy of cities built around the body in motion.
Dubai, a symbol of automotive urbanism, is already investing in pedestrian promenades. Abu Dhabi goes further; with its island origins (in this way recalling Venice), it plays intriguingly with its masterplan. One of its most compelling districts, Saadiyat Cultural District, is being created as a walkable quarter, one you want to approach on foot, fly into or arrive by water, contemplating the magnificence of each architectural island.
The cities of the future will become radically greener. And here, the Arab nations possess remarkable know-how: in essence, they are engaged in terraforming on Earth, transforming desert into oases. What once seemed impossible is becoming reality: parks, mangrove forests, green corridors amid the sands. This experience will prove invaluable to the entire planet.
Walkability is inseparable from Urban Health, where the built environment becomes an instrument of wellbeing. Wellness is no longer confined to spas; it is becoming a principle of urbanism. Fashion is already responding to this shift: athleisure is the language of a generation caring for itself and the planet. Smart fabrics that shift colour with mood, adaptive materials, clothing as digital ecosystem: all this awaits us. Cities and clothing, architecture and fashion, and the human being itself, will grow smarter together.
The promenade will become the place where building and clothing perform together, façade transforms into scenery, and the person becomes the main character.
