Dressing Is Easy

Archizoom’s Sartorial Revolution

by Chiara Clarke Siravo

Florentine architects Archizoom Associati first

presented their sartorial manifesto Dressing is
Easy as a stop-motion animation at the XV
Milan Triennale in 1973. It was a “do-it-yourself
system” to produce essential and neutral items
of clothing based on a piece of fabric measuring
70×70 cm stitched together with colored thread.
The object itself came in the form of a kit or
“domestic assembly case,” containing an
instruction manual, squares of fabric, scissors,
needles and thread.

Dressing made easy

In 1971, Archizoom began to experiment with
clothing. Their first project was “Dressing
Design: Nearest Habitat System,” which
consisted of a system of garments to be worn in
 Archizoom’s No-Stop-City. Conceived between
1968–1971, the No-Stop-City was the group’s
earliest vision of the city of the future.
Homogeneous and utilitarian, it was designed in
the image factories and supermarkets, places
defined by their functionality. What emerged
was a design for an endlessly sprawling city that
was artificially ventilated and illuminated,
defying the principles of traditional architecture
based on natural lighting and ventilation. Their
“continuous residential structure” eliminated
the need for spaces between buildings, therefore
eliminating façades and more importantly the
social divisions that denote poverty and
inequality. It was perhaps their most far-
reaching attempt to imagine a world devoid of
any figurative references — a world populated
by natural objects, ready-made industrial
products and transient people living in
impermanent dwellings. In this architectural
blankness, made of a limitless grid similar to an
empty canvas, everything becomes possible,
from the most extreme consumerism to the total
emancipation of individuals from the
constraints of industrial society. Andrea Branzi,
a founding member of Archizoom, later wrote:
“the city became a collection of beds, tables,
chairs, …cupboards,” and indeed clothes.
Archizoom Associati, Dressing Design: Nearest Habitat
System, 1971
The architects did not limit themselves to
furnishing the No-Stop-City— clothing also had
to undergo a radical change. Picture a closet that
works all year round, regardless of the season;
by simply adding and subtracting elements, the
consumer is ready for any circumstance.
The Dressing Design was meant to be a modular
open structure that included a body —a tank
suit, a long-sleeved loose fitting overall, a multi-
functional gauze shirt, fury socks, decorated
synthetic fur coats and, my personal favorites,
belted girdles or ‘Limb Girdles,’ which were
synthetic fur protection that could be latched
onto legs or arms during the winter months. All
these items were multifunctional and
incorporated multiple typologies in one. The
body or tank suit, for example, might have
buttons running down its front, a collar,
pockets, short sleeves, long sleeves or a turtle-
neck. It could serve as a swimsuit, as underwear,
as a shirt or on its own (the No-Stop-City was
artificially ventilated thus eliminating
seasons). Dressing Design was part of a wider
anti-fashion movement that was reacting
against rigid sartorial traditions, seasonal
fashions and gender-specific clothing. In fact,
most of the designs were unisex and one-size fits
all. It was prêt-à-porter and anticipated the
adoption of gym clothing for everyday use.

However, unlike Archizoom’s later designs, the

No-Stop-City and its sartorial culture saw a
plethora of industrially produced objects at their
center.

Branzi explains that they “looked on fashion as

material culture” as well as “a theoretical model
for a new kind of production” that saw flexibility
as its guiding philosophy: “it was no longer
society that must resemble the factory in every
way, but the factory that had to try to adapt to
society.” For Archizoom, sartorial design was an
opportunity to invent a “different way of using
clothing” that no longer followed the rules and
shapes of the human form, but allowed the
material and the way it was cut to dictate that
form. This formula is already visible in ‘Dressing
Design’ with its unisex, one size fits all
composition, but with ‘Dressing is Easy’ and its
geometric forms, the human body is little more
than the underlying pretext.

If one turns to the pages of the manifesto itself

and to its origami-like drawings it feels as if one
is looking at an architectural kit, but for the
production of clothing; the objects’ production
techniques are transposed onto the making of
supple and ephemeral garments. An emphasis
on the visual representation of the process is
powerful and far beyond the practical
requirements: it is visually rhetorical.

Archizoom Associati, No-Stop-City, 1970

The Dressing is Easy manifesto is dotted with
explanatory captions (in English and Italian)
that set out the process and its potential, and
highlight the advantages of its novel approach.
Traditional sartorial techniques and terms are
replaced by Archizoom’s instructions and the
use of words like “problems,” “complexities,”
“industrial,” “waste” vs. “facilitate,” “possibility,”
and “elementary.” What was once complex is
now easy and problem free. The apparently
rigid design reveals itself not only to be simple
to execute but also creatively flexible and in line
with post-modern notions that reject a single
point of view. With personalized stitching, the
freedom to assemble different elements, or even
use one garment for many different functions—
an apron through the simple act of folding can
become a skirt—the object becomes multi-
functional, one-size fits all, unisex, in sum a
flexible lifestyle.

Archizoom present us with an archetype, their

approach is pure, perfect, Platonic. Dressing is
Easy is perhaps the most successful material
embodiment of their effort to destroy culture.
The garments emerge not from a culture, but
from a formula. The body is reduced to the
perfect geometric forms that bring to mind the
“tradition of the Neo-Platonic diagrams of the
Renaissance artists who inscribed the human
body in a circle or square in correct proportion.
Each part of the bodily measurement was turned
into a square, and in this conception the Union
of the human figure with geometry was
prefigured.”

Through this union of body and geometric form,

all cultural excesses are stripped away. And the
formula extends to the experience of wearing
these easy garments. Just by looking at the
images of both the garments and the process of
making them, a sense of liberation is tangible —
a cultural liberation that is achieved first
through the act of making and then through the
act of wearing. This, I believe, is what
makes Dressing is Easy a truly radical object.

The Destruction of Culture

Dressing is Easy was part of a wider effort by
Archizoom and other Italian radical
architectural groups coming out of Florence in
the late 1960s and 1970s to wipe the slate clean
and demolish capitalism’s modes of production
through design. In 1972, Andrea Branzi writes in
Casabella: “the precise role of today’s avant-
garde is the “technical destruction of culture. By
culture,” he continues, “I mean all the values
and meanings—moral, religious, and aesthetic—
of the society in which we find ourselves.” The
text, entitled ‘La Gioconda Sbarbata: The Role of
the Avant-Garde’, is the first of several articles
Branzi wrote for Casabella between 1972 and
1976 in which he contextualizes the projects and
objects designed by Archizoom. The ‘technical
destruction of culture’ took the form of
technical destruction of objects. This was to be
achieved by abolishing the distinction between
producer and consumer, through the
simplification and reduction of the techniques
and practical ways of making that required such
high levels of specialization in order to produce
western culture and the increasingly complex
objects it so fetishized.

Archizoom Associati, No-Stop-City, 1970

This objective began to take shape in 1971 when
Archizoom and Superstudio contributed to an
issue of IN dedicated to “the destruction of the
object.” Transforming the production and
therefore the meaning of objects, by going back
to their functional roots, would transform man’s
needs and therefore man’s behavior. The home
would become an empty, yet well-equipped
neutral space or a “cavity with fittings” in which
the true meaning of things could be discerned
more clearly: “The destruction of all cultural and
moral structures is an operation whose goal is
the removal of any barriers that prevent a direct
knowledge of reality.” (Radical Notes, p.182)

This is what Archizoom meant by easy. It was

born out of what they saw as an urgent need to
simplify our mode of existence. The word is first
used by Branzi in the very same text on the role
of the Avant-Garde, which closes with the
statement:

“We must arrive at this historical appointment

with all the structures and technologies that
render culture a product of specialists, unusable
for the masses, already undermined and
destroyed. Today, creating music, poetry,
painting, sculpture, dance, engaging in any
other physical activity requires a technical
knowledge of the particular subject matter. The
avant-garde destroys these techniques,
prefacing any operation it undertakes with one
program only: “Art is Easy.””
Archizoom Associati, Dressing Is Easy, Casabella 384, 1973
By the time Archizoom contributed to the
seminal MOMA 1972 exhibition “Italy: The New
Domestic Landscape,” the slogan had become
“Living is Easy.” The group presented an empty
room in which visitors were encouraged to free
themselves and imagine their own domestic
setting with the help of a recorded voice
describing an interior. Devoid of the objects that
inevitably would give the space cultural
meaning, impose patterns of behavior, and
therefore constrain the imagination of its
“inhabitant,” Archizoom turned their backs on
the formal Avant-Garde of the period that was
focused on designing “machines for living.”

There was more: Branzi and Archizoom argued

that, ‘To reject culture is to reject work.’ This, he
said “will be the biggest collective discovery of
this century.” Freedom from work would return
power to the masses to re-appropriate and
shape their environments.  After all, with the
abolition of specialization and the simplification
of modes of production it would be possible to
enter a future that no longer depended on the
capitalist system established by the industrial
revolution, thus significantly reducing the
amount of work shared by society. The home
would become a “gymnasium in which to
experiment with one’s own creative faculties,
atrophied by centuries of productive work; the
house as an equipped parking lot where one can
act out directly the very phenomenon of living.”
Archizoom, unlike the architects of the Modern
Movement, saw design rather than architecture
as the agent of change.

The search for a ‘Neutral Base’

Archizoom were specific about the materials
they used in the production of the Dressing is
Easy prototypes. Lucia Bartolini, the Archizoom
member that oversaw most of the project,
sourced non-precious mostly white cotton
fabrics used in domestic settings for table-
cloths, sheets or the lining of hunting jackets.
Others were made of cooked wool as well as
denim.

Blue Jeans were a source of inspiration as they

had established a precedent for neutral
garments worn by very different social groups
and used in different ways. They were “devoid of
any really expressive features,” while being
“practical and robust.” Archizoom saw jeans as
“the ‘neutral base’ out of which developed the
most advanced fashions of the post-war years.”
Thus, in order to design a ‘neutral’ product, it
was not enough to reduce the complexities of
shape and stitching: the materials had to follow
the same logic.
Nanni Strata, Il Manto e la Pelle, Triennale di Milano, 1974
While devising the designs for Dressing is Easy,
Archizoom were in close dialogue with the Milan
fashion designer, Nanni Strada. Her research,
although different, was also closely linked to
methods of production, geometric shapes,
neutrality, material and most importantly, the
abandonment of traditional sartorial methods
and seasonal constraints. In 1974, just a few
months after Casabellapublished ‘Dressing is
Easy,’ they did a feature on Strada and her
fashion system entitled ‘The Cloak and the Skin.’
Rather than proposing a domestic sewing kit,
Strada’s Skin line abandoned stitching entirely
producing a “continuous elastic surface which
can be pressed in one hand and lengthened 3 or
4 times, but takes shape only with use.” It was a
one-size fits all bodysuit: “a garment (that)
becomes a skin.”

Strada’s Cloak, to be worn over the skin, was an

entirely different experiment, comparable to
Archizoom’s geometrical designs.
The cloak “leaned on the body, with its own
form and folding” and its stitches acted as
testament to the process applied in making it.
Strada, unlike Archizoom, designed for women
and although her designs are largely forgotten
by the mainstream today, her innovations had a
strong impact at the time. The British feminist
author, Brigid Keenan, writes about Strada’s
ingenuity in a chapter entitled ‘Freedom
Fighters’ in her book The Women We Wanted to
Look Like. By stripping away excess, all the way
down to the skin in Strada’s case and down to
geometry in the case of Archizoom, in order to
find a “neutral base”, both designers achieved
something extremely powerful that touches us at
a profound, almost inexpressible level.
The neutral base could very well be
the instinctive base.

The Hammer and the Destruction

of Work
If you look closely, one of the photographs in
the Casabella Dressing is Easy article features a
tool in the pocket of one of the garments. Surely
it is there to draw attention to the existence of
pockets, a very useful component. But it is
perhaps also an homage to the Global
Tools project. This project was initiated in 1973
by Superstudio and involved several radical
architecture groups across Italy, including
Archizoom.

Global Tools, Document 1, 1973

Global Tools embodied a search for and an
investigation into basic tools for living and how
they were made. Again in an effort to reduce the
distance between producer and consumer. The
project took the form of a counter-school of
architecture, which eventually came to be called
a ‘non-school.’ The non-school program was
organized around several themes: “the body,
construction, communication, survival and
theory” Much like the American Whole Earth
Catalogue, they sought to catalogue basic tools
and techniques and focus on “real needs rather
than the commodification of desire.” Dressing is
Easy was conceived against the Global
Tools backdrop and can be interpreted as
a global tool for dressing and living in and of
itself.

What I find most beautiful about Archizoom

Associati’s project, Dressing is Easy, is that its
formula works with as well as without the
surrounding ideology they devised. By
examining the project within the context of their
other work one is forced to examine the
mechanisms of production and consumption
that to a large extent still characterize our
society today. But, if you happen to flip through
the pages of Dressing is Easy by chance, as I
did, ignorant of the philosophy that shaped it,
one cannot but be profoundly touched by the
simplicity of the plans and the garments. You
are immediately gripped, transported by a
desire to make and wear the wrap-around
tunics, shirts and trousers. You can imagine
whatever you like. This is because Dressing is
Easy is an archetype. It is still contemporary; it
escapes nostalgia and the category of period
fashion. With this object, Archizoom truly
succeeded in destroying culture and creating
something that is timeless and at the same time
perpetually radical.

This essay first appeared in Riot of

Perfume, issue 6, 2015.