It’s hard to tear your eyes away from Leigh Bowery’s pink sequined codpiece, just one of the many sumptuous objects in the cabinet of curiosities that is V&A East Museum, the new museum in London’s Olympic Park. But the idea of radical tailoring underpins this whole building, which exudes an explicit haute couture vibe. For Dublin-based architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, it all started with a sleeve in a Vermeer painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. “I was trying to work with the folds,” says John Tuomey, “which became the first iteration of the building. I started thinking about the fabric that clothes you, the body that’s sheltered, but also the space in between.”
Ideas of draping and concealment were also sparked by the work of Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, the subject of a 2017 V&A retrospective. As part of that exhibition, ghostly X-ray images, at once beautiful and forensic, revealed details not visible to the naked eye, such as boning, hoops and dress weights, which determined the precise fall of fabric and shape of garments.
