Museums & Attractions

Hussein Chalayan and Thomas Heatherwick

On their backgrounds
Hussein Chalayan 'Unlike you, Thomas, I don’t think I’m that much a product of my parents. My mother was very artistic, though, so from a very young age I drew things and was very hands-on. My father was one of the first people to study computer programming in the 1960s but didn’t pursue it – he went on to study silver service. My Turkish-Cypriot upbringing and fact I spent time between Cyprus and London made me a rootless person, I think my work has become my roots in many ways.'

Thomas Heatherwick What was your mum doing?

HC 'I’m an only child and my mother looked after me. At that time she was constantly making things in the house. She was very good with her hands – we’d go to the beach and make sand sculptures. When you are in a remote Mediterranean environment you have to keep yourself occupied so you don’t get bored. A lot of my way of thinking, and how my work has been informed, is related to that.’ Feature continues

TH 'It’s interesting that you think your displacement helped to nourish a curiosity.'

A wood veneer skirt from Chalayan's a/w 2000 collecton 'Afterwards'. (Photography Chris Moore. Courtesy of Hussein Chalayan)

HC ‘Absolutely. I’ve only been able to articulate it in the last few years.’

TH 'I felt displaced; I didn’t feel normal. Everyone else had nice white sandwiches and I had an old brown banana that looked like a cat poo! I lived in Wood Green and we had this big, rambling house and my parents’ bedroom was through a workshop (my mum was into enamelling at that point). Everyone else’s mums were quite glamourous. Mine had calluses because she fixed everything in the house. She was going to craft fares and I was tagging around after her meeting people who were making replicas of fourteenth-century thatch or blacksmithing, so I had a chance to nourish my curiosity.’

HC ‘Your mum actually worked as a craftswoman?’

TH ‘Oh yes. She was a jeweller and an enameller before that. For a child, when you are around that, it’s brilliant. Your bedroom becomes a kind of workshop.’

HC ‘It’s true that as a child you want to fit in, you want to feel normal. You don’t want to stand out.’

TH 'I think at school I must have been very irritating. I think I’ve got quite a slow brain. There was a stubbornness to not pretending you knew if you didn’t know [his school nickname was ‘How-Why’]. At the time you were wishing you did know like everyone else. But now I realise they probably didn’t know either. Now we’re working on buildings there are lots of acronyms and you just have to cut people down when they start talking like that and ask what they mean. I enjoy it when they say: "I don’t know what it stands for".'

HC 'I was also called a "question machine" at school. I would bombard the teacher with questions. I went to a good English school in Cyprus but the teachers just memorised their lessons. At times I may have annoyed other children. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn’t taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable. I wanted to be a pilot but I was always drawing bodies. When I realised I wanted to pursue something creative my parents pushed me towards architecture.’

TH 'What’s funny is no one mentioned architecture to me (even though now a lot of the work we do involves making buildings). I got very interested in inventions.'

HC 'I think that where I came from parents didn’t know what to do with kids like me. I was lucky I went to school in London because the tutors could see what to do. I knew I wanted to do something different. Why would I want to do what other people were already doing, because they would always do it better? I always wanted to work around the body. So throughout my college years my work was quite free. I was about 16 when I knew I could do something at Saint Martins. I thought: It will be the perfect environment.’

TH ‘I feel quite lucky to have been born in a city that happens to be a very creatively inspiring place to be. I didn’t have to uproot myself. What I love about London is that if you are really interested in something, wigs for example, within an hour you can probably find the expert in the whole world on wigs.’

How do designing fashion and designing buildings compare?

A laser dress from Chalayan's s/s 2008 'Readings' collection (Courtesy of Hussein Chalayan)

HC 'Fashion is so much more transient: you have to design at least two collections a year. We design four in total, including the younger line. When you start developing a new idea, sometimes it goes beyond the six months so you end up doing eras of work, ideas can flow for two years. But what you do, Thomas, is something really indelible.'

TH 'Could you do one collection every two years? Is it possible to have a no-show. Do you have performance pressure?'

HC 'But then I’d go bankrupt. You are part of a system where there is a demand for people to buy a product every six months; you are part of a chain. Of course, I have thought whether I could be like a musician and release an album every three years. It’s impossible to reform the system but that’s why I do other projects in my own time like making films, installations and pieces for museums and galleries.’

TH 'How do you have any "own time"?’

HC 'I multitask. I can be working on a collection and a film at the same time. It can take a lot out of me, but the processes come from the same source. From a brief I set myself I can make a film, I can make a collection, I can make an installation.'

TH 'I was actually really envious when I was at the RCA. I found it so funny, the difference between the electricity of an audience sitting looking at a piece of white MDF while waiting for a fashion show versus my department, where a visitor walks in, has a look and then walks out. I had show envy. I thought: I’d like that medium. I asked if we could have the same way of presenting the products and I was told "no".'

What motivates you?

TH 'Is there the sense, Hussein, that you are an artist just there expressing yourself, oblivious to the world around you, or is it a response to what’s around? For me and my studio, it’s a response to what’s around. It’s the gaps that interest me. I find it off-putting when people work on similar ideas to me. When I was growing up I had a lot of questions, such as: Why are ice creams so small? A few years later someone invented the Magnum. If someone hadn’t, I expect by now I would be designing bigger ice creams.'

HC 'I call it the blind spot. Almost every single project is filling a blind spot. One example is the idea of making a fabric that is like a film; I call it the video dress. My work is about extending the body and appropriating the body, and also amplifying what’s already in the body. Even buildings are like bodies to me. They have a system, a centre, drainage.'

TH 'I’ve been interested in areas where ideas haven’t been explored. I’m quite interested in prisons. Everyone lavishes time on the local library, the art gallery. The cliché is that a town must have a landmark art gallery or a landmark bridge. But how about making the world’s best car park?'

HC 'What you are saying is you want to carve out your own niche. Fashion is a very scrutinised business, it’s all about power and money so for me to carve out a little space in that is a miracle.'

TH 'I see no professional difference in designing garments you wear and objects you use – they are one connected thing.'

HC ‘I think curiosity is the driving force in both cases. I don’t really understand the world. I’m not really that bright but I’m always curious and exploring, and finding another way of looking at something. In a way, designing is a form of self-imposed therapy for understanding.’

With that, Heatherwick talks Chalayan though his model of the East Beach Café. Chalayan is fascinated by how the drainpipes act as columns and how the raw steel has coroded into a warm russet brown. I needn’t have worried about them getting on; within minutes of meeting, their similarities were spookily obvious. And, most refreshingly, in industries so often driven by egos, Heatherwick and Chalayan have a shared humility.

It’s as we say our goodbyes, exchange cards and shake hands that I realise exactly how much the worlds of architecture and fashion do collide. We have a quick glance around Heatherwick’s cocoon-like office, within it a small desk and a poster on the wall, an anatomical drawing of the human body with some Turkish writing. ‘It says “The Human Body is Like a Machine”,’ explains Chalayan with a knowing smile. ‘I have exactly the same poster on my office wall.’

‘Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture’ features more than 200 works by over 40 internationally renowned architects and fashion designers runs from Apr 24 to Aug 10 at The Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, Strand, WC2 (020 7845 4600 /www.somersethouse.org.uk) Waterloo tube/rail. Open daily 10am-6pm. Adm £8.