The Cut Came First: Christian Siriano at SCAD FASH

ART & CULTURE · ATLANTA

Reading time: 9 min

More than sixty looks filled SCAD FASH in Atlanta for a major museum survey of Christian Siriano’s archive, arranged as a spectrum of colour and posed as though the gallery were a red carpet. The clothes are usually discussed as a position on who gets dressed. The more useful way to read them is as a position on how a garment is cut, and that argument starts with two London internships served before he was twenty-two.

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Christian Siriano: People Are People ran at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta from 6 May to 9 October 2022, bringing together more than sixty looks drawn from the designer’s own archive. It was curated by Rafael Gomes, the Savannah College of Art and Design’s director of fashion exhibitions, and it gathered garments worn by Michelle Obama, Janelle Monáe, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Lizzo, Billy Porter and Ariana Grande, alongside pieces that had never been shown publicly before.

The staging is the first thing anyone notices. Gomes arranged the looks as a continuous spectrum of colour rather than by date or by collection, and mannequins are posed in the attitudes of a photographed arrival: hip cocked, chin up, one arm out. A gallery becomes a step-and-repeat, and the visitor walks the line the photographers usually occupy.

That is a good exhibition-design decision, and it also sets up the question the clothes themselves answer. These are garments made to be seen at a distance of two metres by a wall of lenses, on a specific named body, once. What holds them together as a body of work is not a signature print or a house silhouette. It is a way of building a dress.

The training that explains the cut

Christian Siriano was born on 18 November 1985 in Annapolis, Maryland, and started making clothes at thirteen while working at a hair salon, producing pieces for its annual shows. He studied fashion at the Baltimore School for the Arts. The Fashion Institute of Technology turned down his application, so he went to London instead, to American InterContinental University.

That detour is the most consequential thing in his biography, because of where it put him. In his final year he interned at Vivienne Westwood, and then at Alexander McQueen.

Those are not two decorative names on a CV. They are the two London houses of that generation most completely built on cut. Westwood’s work runs on historical pattern-cutting brought forward: corsetry, the crinoline, the tailoring of the eighteenth century rebuilt to sit on a modern body, with the internal structure doing the shaping rather than the fabric. McQueen’s runs on cut as the whole argument, the bumster, the shoulder line, the sense of a garment engineered around a body rather than draped over it. An intern in either studio spends their time close to toiles, seams, canvas and boning.

Siriano won the fourth season of Project Runway in 2008 at twenty-two, the youngest winner the show had had, taking three challenge wins along the way. He launched his own label at New York Fashion Week on 13 September 2008, was elected to the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2013, and was named to Time’s hundred most influential people in 2018. The television origin is the part everyone knows. The construction training is the part that explains the clothes.

The tuxedo gown is a construction argument

The single most reproduced garment in the exhibition is the black tuxedo gown Billy Porter wore to the 91st Academy Awards in February 2019, and it is worth looking at as an object rather than as a moment.

It is one garment doing two jobs at the waist. Above it, a tailored tuxedo bodice with satin lapels, structured shoulders and the internal canvas of menswear. Below it, a full strapless ballgown skirt with the volume of couture eveningwear. The seam where those meet is the whole design. Two tailoring traditions that use entirely different internal architecture, one built to flatten and square a torso, the other built to compress a waist and throw weight outward, joined in a single body.

Siriano has described the brief in practical terms. “Billy wanted to look regal and appropriate for the Oscars, but Billy is a little bit more daring,” he has said, and of the result, “it became such a moment because the first man to wear a dress on the Oscars’ red carpet was a big deal.”

The reason it reads as effortless on the carpet is that neither half is a costume version of itself. The jacket is a real jacket, cut and canvassed as one. The skirt is a real ballgown skirt, supported from underneath. A designer without a tailoring grounding tends to solve this by suggestion, printing or draping the idea of a tuxedo onto a dress. This one is built.

Fitting a body the industry had not measured

In July 2016 the actor Leslie Jones said publicly that she had been unable to find a designer willing to dress her for the premiere of Ghostbusters. Siriano answered, and she walked the premiere in a red off-the-shoulder gown he made for her.

The story is usually told as a gesture, and it was one. It is more interesting as a technical problem, because the two things are the same problem.

A sample-size gown is not a small version of a large gown. Scaling a pattern up does not produce a garment that works, because the proportions of the body do not scale linearly and the internal structure that holds a bodice in position has to be re-engineered rather than enlarged. Bust support, waist suppression, the position and number of seams, the boning, the weight the shoulders are asked to carry: all of it changes. A house that only ever cuts to one set of measurements has no pattern block for anything else and no practised way of making one.

Siriano’s studio has that capability because building structure into a bodice is what the work has always been. His range now runs from a US 0 to a 28, which is a manufacturing and pattern-grading commitment rather than a statement of intent, and it is the reason the exhibition can put a Lizzo look and an Ariana Grande look in the same room and have them read as one designer’s hand.

The eye that blinks on a timer

The exhibition’s most technically unusual object is the dress Janelle Monáe wore to the Met Gala, a surreal composition built around a working eye that opens and closes.

“It really is like an abstract Picasso face, in a way. We wanted it to be very surreal,” Siriano has said of it, and on the mechanism, simply: “it blinks on an automatic timer.” He has called it one of his favourite things the studio has ever made.

Putting a moving mechanical element into a garment is a set of problems most eveningwear never has to solve. There is a power source and a timer to conceal, weight to distribute so the front of the dress does not pull, a rigid assembly to mount inside a soft structure, and the whole thing has to survive a staircase, a car and several hours of standing. It is a small piece of product design living inside a couture bodice, and it only works because there is enough internal structure in the dress to carry it.

Sixty looks, and a museum built to hold them

SCAD FASH opened on 3 October 2015 inside the university’s Atlanta building at 1600 Peachtree Street, adding 10,000 square feet that includes the public gallery, a media library and, most usefully for a show like this one, a fashion conservation lab. Its founding exhibition was a survey of Oscar de la Renta. Paula Wallace, SCAD’s president and founder, described the ambition at the opening: “SCAD FASH celebrates fashion as a universal language and garments as vehicles of identity.”

The conservation lab is the unglamorous detail that makes a contemporary fashion survey possible. Recent red-carpet couture is a difficult conservation object. It is often built for one night rather than for permanence, using cut fabrics, adhesives, applied crystal, dyed silks that fade under gallery light, and, in Monáe’s case, electronics. Mounting sixty such garments so they hold their intended line on a static mannequin, and keeping them stable for five months of opening hours, is specialist work.

There is a reason a survey like this is possible at all, and it sits in the phrase “the designer’s own archive”. A custom red-carpet gown is usually made for one wearer and one night, and where it goes afterwards varies: some are kept by the wearer, some are auctioned, some quietly disappear. A house that retains what it makes ends up holding a physical record of its own development, which is why the show could include looks that had never been publicly displayed and could reach back across fifteen years without borrowing from private collections. Keeping the archive is an unglamorous decision taken years before anybody proposes an exhibition, and it is the thing that makes the exhibition possible.

Gomes’s colour-spectrum arrangement does something specific for that material too. Sorting by hue rather than chronology removes the retrospective’s usual crutch, the narrative of a designer’s development, and asks the visitor to compare construction across fifteen years instead. Two dresses made a decade apart sit side by side because they are the same red, and what the eye then picks up is the shared logic of how each one is put together.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easiest way to write about this exhibition is to write about who is in it. Sixty looks, seven famous names, a designer known for saying yes when others were unavailable, and a title that puts the argument on the wall in three words.

What the room actually shows is narrower and more useful. Dressing a wider range of people is a pattern-cutting capability before it is anything else, and a studio either has it or does not. Siriano spent his final student year inside two houses that treat cut as the entire proposition, and everything the exhibition puts on a mannequin descends from that: a tuxedo bodice welded to a ballgown skirt and carried off as one garment, a red dress engineered for a body no sample rail had a block for, a working mechanism suspended inside a soft bodice without dragging the front of the dress down.

Arranged by colour rather than by year, those decisions sit next to each other and stop looking like separate news stories. They start looking like a method.