AAW x PHILIPPE RAHM - CLIMATIC APPAREL
Philippe Rahm is a swiss architect, known for his architecture office “Philippe Rahm architectes”, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. His recent work includes the first prize for the Farini competition in Milan in 2019, the 70 hectares Central Park in Taichung, Taiwan, completed in December 2018, the Agora of the French National Radio in Paris, a 2700 m2 Exhibition architecture for the Luma Foundation in Arles, France. He has held professorships at GSD Harvard University, Columbia and Princeton Universities. His work has been exhibited in 2017 at the Chicago and Seoul Architecture Biennales.
Back in June 2019, Philippe Rahm asked ABOUT A WORKER to create collaboratively “Climatic Apparel”: a fashion line based on the Economy of means and energy saving’s ideology, in order to constitute the new basics for the era of global warming. Climatic Apparel offers two unisex outfits, one designed for summer and one for winter. The creation process was based on ABOUT A WORKER’s basics: jackets and pants, in which Philippe Rahm X ABOUT A WORKER modified the shape and materials in the simplest way possible to make them the most appropriate for their purpose: dressing the body against heat and cold.
The fashion industry is perhaps one of the last bastions of postmodern thinking of the second half of the 20th century. Post moderns are less interested in why we make and wear clothes, but rather in what social, economic and cultural signs clothes convey.
For Philippe Rahm x ABOUT A WORKER, an apparel is used to protect humans from the sun in summer, because the visible and infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum of its rays overheat the skin, while ultraviolet rays damage it. For post moderns, an apparel in summer will evoke the Côte d'Azur in 1920 or whatever else.
For Philippe Rahm x ABOUT A WORKER, in winter, an apparel is used to keep humans warm, preventing cold winds from sweeping away the heat from our body, and to keep it against our skin by thermally insulating it from the outside air. While for us it is thermal and physiological reasons that guide the design, for structuralists it will be cultural and aesthetic reasons.
The style must grow out of this initial reality of clothing, and in the face of the climatic challenges of our time. It is not useless to return to the thermal fundamentals of fashion.
The European launch of the "Climatic Apparel" collection, initiated by the architectural firm Philippe Rahm architectes with the fashion brand About a Worker, will take place on January 14, 2020 in Rome, Italy, at the Memmo Foundation, with a fashion show at 19:30 (music by Olivier Marguerit). Two models from the summer and winter collection will be on display at the Memmo Foundation until March 22, 2020.
