The AA School in Paris recently had their final review for their architecture and fashion studio, Post McQueen Embryos.  This studio regularly creates some of the most amazing designs we’ve ever seen.  Although not necessiraly wearable, the designs are certainly provocative, much like the design of Alexander McQueen.  We always find these types of cross-discipline studios super interesting, seeing how architects can use their skills and techniques to create interesting designs of things besides buildings.

SCHOOL: The AA Paris
STUDENTS: Krisada Sungkram, Maria Lima, Lilli Maunula, Zhenyu Yan, Maria-Thala Al Aswad, Rémi Chevrillon, Chloe O’Regan, Rodrigo Quiñones and Leila Mohaghegh
PROFESSOR: Isaïe Bloch
SEMESTER: Spring 2012

Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) was one of the most influential and provocative designers of his generation. His clothing challenged the generic and conventional parameters of fashion to express culture, politics and identity. McQueen went beyond the physical constraints of traditional clothing design by looking at its ideological and conceptual possibilities, addressing questions of race, gender, religion, sexuality and environment.

During our March workshop, McQueen’s evolutionary designs will act as prompts for generating embryos within the body of work that is [Fashion+Architecture]. In biology, an embryo is defined as a multicellular organism at its earliest stage of development, from the time of the first cell division until birth or egg-hatching. In the AA’s Paris Visiting School, a collective embryo-genesis will fuse McQueen’s DNA and legacy with a novel and crucial debate about fashion in the post-McQueen era. Over a ten-day gestation period A A embryos will grow and develop a consciousness informed by a set of social, contextual and operational issues ranging from mass production driven by capitalism to global temperature variations.

The post-McQueen agenda seeks to eradicate the non-responsiveness within clothing design by reviewing McQueen’s alienated proportions, aiming to bust fashion out of its commercial stranglehold. Central to the programme is the desire to grow the potential for meshing the parallel disciplines of fashion and architecture within a digital/ physical cross-over studio. Our overriding aim: to consolidate the emerging discipline of bodily architecture.

All text and images via The AA Paris (, , website)