Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan, Fall/Winter 2000 "Afterwords", London, February 2000 The set was the collection. At the end of the runway sat a small living room: four chairs under gray slipcovers, a low coffee table, a television beyond. Near the close, four models pulled off the covers and wore them as dresses, the chairs folded down to be carried like luggage, and one model stepped into the center of the table and raised it into a rigid wooden skirt. Chalayan drew on wartime displacement and his family's history in Cyprus, so the room packing itself up reads as a home being abandoned in minutes. For set designers it remains the clearest case of furniture doing the storytelling.