ARE CLOTHES MODERN?
An Essay on Contemporary Apparel
Bernard Rudofsky
Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947. First edition. Quarto. Yellow cloth decorated in black. 241 pp. Fully illustrated with black and white photographs, vintage advertisements, and ephemeral images. Museum of Modern Art members opening invitation [1944] laid in. Dust jacket flaps glued to frontis pages [see scans]. Former owners signatures [x 2] to front free endpapers, otherwise interior unmarked and clean. Yellow cloth lightly mottled and spotted with upper corner pushed. A nearly very good copy.
8.75 x 11.25-inch hardcover book with 241 pages fully illustrated with black and white photographs, vintage advertisements, and ephemeral images. Typography and layout following the style of Gyorgy Kepes’ “Language of Vision.” Original Museum of Modern Art members’ opening invitation [1944] laid in.
“Rudofsky’s book . . . [is] an idiosyncratic, beautifully designed volume full of passionate descriptions, and, especially, infographics, which takes a cross-section across the waist of a gentleman’s body in full dress and, like a slice through a tree trunk, reads his layers, while the frontal “X-ray” detects all of his buttons and pockets.”
“Rudofsky’s intention was to interrogate the relationship between people and their clothing in his contemporary moment, assessing what worked across cultures and what needed to change along with the pace of modernity (who needed over 20 pockets when telecommunications and technology were on the rise, really?) While his approach predated most of the theoretical lenses — postcolonial, feminist, postmodernist, etc. — that we find imperative today, his exhibition catalogue and the images of the exhibition were incisive and have proven incredibly useful to our research.” — Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, MoMA
Contents;
- Are clothes modern?
- Topography of modesty
- The unfashionable human body
- Does the pipe fit the face?
- Clothes in our time
- Cut and dry goods
- Sartoriasis, or the enjoyment of discomfort
- Dress reform and reform dress
- The poor man’s esthetics
- Invocation of democracy
- Text references
Excerpted from a Museum of Modern Art press release: “An architect friend of Mr. Rudofsky, Felix Augenfeld, has written the following engaging sketch of him:
“Bernard Rudofsky is of the disapproving kind. His disapproval of the institutions of this world reaches a very unusual degree of intensity, a degree which makes his keen displeasure turn into creative impulse. And since he disapproves of many more things than the average person, he finds that, at the age of 39, he has "been successfully active in a number of varied fields. He is, or has been, an architect, engineer, industrial designer, stage designer, editor, musician, actor, fashion designer, shoemaker, archeologist, photographer and typographer. He considers human dwellings the crowning failure of mankind and has therefore made architecture his main profession.
“Like every Viennese he likes music and the stage. His other passion is traveling on which he has spent one-third of his time and every single penny he could spare. Thus he became acquainted with the Balkans and their primitive ways of living, with Asia Minor and Greece, where money is non-essential, with Switzerland, France, Scandinavia and the old Weimar Germany. He has come to the conclusion that people fight and quibble because of lack of privacy, dress stupidly, eat badly, and drink only to stop worrying.
“In 1931 he left Berlin and his architectural work to go South and find out how to enjoy life, to build and to work intelligently. For the next five years he indulged in his passion for living on remote Mediterranean islands like Procida, Ischia, Capri. A house he designed for himself was forbidden by the Military High Command since it was windowless and of such unusual design that it aroused suspicion.
“Mr. Rudofsky has frequently exposed himself voluntarily to the refreshing experience of starting life in a new country. He is in the habit of arriving there without any money in his pocket and of leaving for another country the very moment he is threatened with financial success. He had his narrowest escape in Milan, Italy, where in 1937 he was planning hotels radically different from today’s pattern and where he was editing and writing for a magazine of art and architecture.
“In 1938 he settled in Buenos Aires, but the winter climate drove him to tropical Rio de Janeiro. During three years of architectural work in Brazil he built some houses which in Europe were considered the -best on the American continent. Of his work Sacheverell Sitwell said, '...in the space of three years he built a pair of private houses that in their way are among the greatest successes of the whole modern movement. The Arnstein House...has been described as the most beautiful house in the entire American continent.
“He came to the United States three years ago when he won a prize in the Industrial Design Competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. After learning his fifth language, he worked for a year as associate editor and art director of an architectural magazine.
“Most of Mr. Rudofsky’s time is spent on what seems to everyone most unrewarding and impractical--study and reading, collecting material in support of his favorite idea: that modern architecture is Just another kind of failure. He believes it is bound to be so because architecture is the most integrated expression of our way of living. In order to create good architecture ways of living must be critically investigated. Thus a revised scale o£ values has to be applied to the functions of our daily life, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, music making, recreation and social life. Architecture in the broader sense in which he conceives it has to be approached by readjusting the elements on which it is based.”
Bernard Rudofsky (Moravia, 1905 – 1988) was an American writer, architect, collector, teacher, designer, and social historian. Ada Louise Huxtable called him “the master iconoclast of the modern movement.”
Rudofsky earned a doctorate in architecture in Austria before working in Germany, Italy, and a dozen other countries. He temporarily settled in Brazil in the 1930s and opened an architectural practice there, building several notable residences in São Paulo. An entry in a 1941 design competition brought an invitation from MOMA to tour the US; in the wake of Pearl Harbor, as an Austrian native, he was given the option of staying in the US. He remained based in New York City until his death, although he continued to travel (sometimes for years at a stretch). Rudofsky variously taught at Yale, MIT, Cooper-Hewitt, Waseda University in Tokyo, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He was a Ford, Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow.
Rudofsky was most influential for organizing a series of controversial MOMA exhibits in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He is best remembered today for a number of urbane books that still provide relevant design insight that is concealed in entertaining, subversive sarcasm. His interests ranged from vernacular architecture to Japanese toilets and sandal design. Taken together, his written work constitutes a sustained argument for humane and sensible design.
In 1944 Rudofsky and his wife Berta were invited to Black Mountain College for two weeks. Bernard gave two lectures on the sad state of clothing design, calling contemporary dress "anachronistic, irrational, impractical and harmful" and literally unsuitable. One of his lectures was called "How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes?". Berta was convinced to organize an impromptu course on sandalmaking. Berta was invited back the following year, and their successful venture Bernardo Sandals was organized in 1947 and still thrives.
1944 Press release titled MUSEUM OF MODERN ART TO OPEN EXHIBITION ARE CLOTHES MODERN?
On Wednesday, November 29, the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, will open to the public an exhibition formerly called Problems of Clothing but now retitled Are Clothes Modern? It will not be a style or fashion show; it will not display costumes; it will not offer specific dress reforms. The purpose of the exhibition is to bring about an entirely new and fresh approach to the subject of clothes, to focus attention on dress as though it were an utterly new phenomenon, and to take the blinders of tradition off modern eyes so they can see that certain conventions, accepted as inseparable from dress and therefore never questioned, are in fact useless, impractical, irrational, harmful and unbeautiful.
To bring about this new realization, Bernard Rudofsky, director of the exhibition, has assembled a wide range of objects including specially sculptured figures which show the body as it would look if it fitted the clothes it wears; ancient and modern footgear such as anklets, stilts and heels which impede rather than assist walking; simulated x-ray examination of the layers upon layers of useless buttons and pockets modern man considers necessary to preserve dignity; a sectional viev; called the seven veils of the male stomach, which shows the numerous layers modern man wraps around his midriff.
Mr. Rudofsky, architect and designer of international note, practiced in Austria, Germany, Italy and Brazil. For fourteen years he devoted much time to the study of clothing, its effect on architecture, living habits, and behavior. The conclusions he has drawn from this study and the original ideas he has evolved are indicated in questions posed by the exhibition, such as:
• Must man (and particularly woman) evolve a symmetrical foot with the large toe in the middle to fit the symmetrical shoe worn today and for centuries past?
• Why should city people be compelled to walk on a sidewalk as hardsurfaced as the roadway on which automobiles travel? The hard surface wears out shoes and the nervous system and is unnecessary in this day of tough and resilient plastics.
• Why should all floors be flat? An irregularly molded floor will be shown in the exhibition, and its advantages indicated.
• Why do we chop beautiful material to pieces to make a dress? The exhibition will show several historical and traditional garments as well as four modern examples made of one or two pieces of material ingeniously joined.
The exhibition will occupy most of the gallery space on the first floor of the Museum and after its closing on March 4 will be circulated throughout the country.