Unravelling the Other: Hussein Chalayan, Olivia Rodrigo and What It Means to Come Undone
"I’m unravelled, I’m unravelled, I’m unravelled.”
And not just metaphorically. Olivia Rodrigo on the Unravelled tour is a sight to behold. During her performance of ‘The Cure’, her pristine white button-down dress, from its schoolgirl collar to neat folds, was the very image of propriety. It channelled ‘The Cure’ music video’s custom Dilara Findikoglu button-up dress with puffed sleeves; the nurse representation conveying a similar sense of being done up. Yet, as the rain cascaded down her body, the dress’s material began to dissolve, the paper-thinness of it becoming one with the droplets of water and melting into a puddle at her feet.
What was left was a skintight ruby corset, almost welding into her body to create a more raw, yet honest image. The garment revisited Hussein Chalayan's Spring 2016 experiments with water-soluble clothing. The show saw falling water from the ceiling leave the two models’ white coats to dissolve, revealing dresses that convey a landscape of printed palm trees and dripping Swarovski crystals. Inspired by Cuba’s final days, in becoming a part of the United States, Chalayan sought to shed the skin of cultural homogeneity in order to capture the island’s authentic culture. In “Pasatiempo”, a metamorphosis occurs, which transforms sincerity into spectacle.
What happens when that language of dissolution is transplanted into the context of romantic vulnerability? In ‘The Cure’, lyricism is Rodrigo’s poison of choice to disseminate her romantic experience of feeling utterly exposed. She describes it as saying goodbye to the teenage view of love as being “sort of black and white.” It is a liberation for her: “I can write about this grey area. I can write about this confusion and this push and pull between these two sides of me, and it can turn into a song that I really like.”
One word for this transition to adult romance: jarring. Suddenly, you encounter that feeling of being truly seen for the first time: a blaring torchlight, highlighting your deepest wounds and vulnerabilities that you’d normally never have the courage to approach or the visibility to recognise. Chalayan understood the challenge of conveying such emotional weight, as he expressed to WWD: “In reference to this work, I was approached by Olivia’s team to design a piece in response to her song ‘The Cure,’ exploring the idea of revealing a sense of vulnerability as the upper layer dissolves. This seemed very poetic and compelling to me.
Olivia Rodrigo sums it up best, and Hussein Chalayan’s blood-red corset supplements her romantic expression. The scarlet of the corset, paired with Rodrigo’s pained expression turned sideways, almost communicates a sense of ownership in reclaiming those traits she deemed toxins that have now become one with her. It brings up the question: How can fashion provide an outlet for emotional expression in a way unlike any other medium?
We carry our deepest wounds within us, yet choose how to conceal or reveal them outwardly every single day. In Place to Be, a film made by Hussein Chalayan, he captures the idea that in fashion we are all migrants: in our daily decisions to express ourselves, whether we be a pop star or an ordinary St Andrean, we are constantly in the process of reimagining and recreating ourselves in a rootless world. In Echoform, Chalayan used three rigid dresses as a link between woman and aeroplane, to suggest that the self can be technologically adjusted and modified. As Susan Sontag writes: “the self is a text…a project, something to be built.” To choose how we come undone: fashion is a paradox.
In this paradox, also lies an element of defiance. Olivia Rodrigo is no stranger to this. Her Daisy Chain Fields lacy and floral outfits were the medium used to champion empowering femininity in the festival supporting women’s rights, reproductive freedom and gender equity that Rodrigo held in August of this year in the sunny state of California. Her recent choice to commission a pale pink raw-silk mini dress, embellished with traditional Palestinian tatreez embroidery depicting birds and linked daisies, also saved Yasmeen Mjalli’s Nol Collective from closing down.
For Chalayan and Rodrigo, it is a natural marriage between the personal and political. Perhaps Rodrigo's dissolving dress is compelling not simply because she becomes “unravelled,” but because both artist and designer have spent their careers questioning what remains once the surface through which others read us disappears.
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