Drapé: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

A nightmare. That is what drapery inspires in every apprentice draughtsman confronted with the cascade of shadows that light sculpts across fabric.

Yet despite the technical difficulty of reproducing it, drapery was a recurring motif in classical painting and sculpture. Plastic in nature, it could serve both as decoration (coloured fabrics used as backdrops for Giovanni Bellini’s Madonnas and Child, for example) and as clothing (think of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus), but above all as a useful subterfuge for concealing all or part of the nakedness of a body, particularly the male body. If centuries of modesty ensured drapery’s ubiquity, one might be surprised that the liberation of the body did not render it entirely obsolete and that, on the contrary, new territories opened up to it.

The Expansion of Drapery

Gradually abandoning painting, which had become abstract, just as sculpture no longer concerned itself with realism, drapery found a new territory in the domestic landscape. It became a poetic expression of absence and elevated abandonment: the first images of Villa Malaparte to circulate from the late 1960s onwards, after Jean-Luc Godard revealed the dramatic power of this architecture, show sofas covered with white cloth, lost in rigorously empty rooms. The blur of the fabric seems to signal the only point of comfort within this mineral space. The nonchalantly draped piece of furniture thus appears to become the archetype of relaxed comfort, combined with Mediterranean light (have we ever seen furniture covered in this way in an Alpine chalet?).

This is what Kazuhide Takahama, trained in Japan and arriving in Italy in the late 1950s, evoked when he designed the Mantilla sofa (1973) for Gavina. A ready-made piece of furniture, as it might be found in a holiday home closed for many months. Through drapery, Takahama emphasises the nakedness of the design and its generic character, whose formal originality lies only in the random undulations of the fabric.

Stripped-Down Drapery

From then on, drapery became form: fixed within the thick acrylic plate of Shiro Kuramata’s “Ghost” lamp, the drapery became a domestic ghost in 1972. Frans van Nieuwenborg and Martijn Wegmanle, meanwhile, dressed a simple socket and light bulb in fibreglass fabric for Ingo Maurer in 1980.

This gesture heralded, particularly in France, the emergence in the 1980s of a simple design inspired by democratic ideals.

Philippe Starck seized the opportunity by designing the Dr Bloodmoney armchair in 1978. This deconstructed echo of Italian designer Mario Bellini’s bourgeois and rigid “CAB” collection marked the introduction of drapery, pleating, and other textile effects into the creator’s vocabulary. In 1992, he designed the masterful Illusion table for the Italian manufacturer FIAM, an object that is at once subtle and powerful, minimal and poetic. Embedded in the glass is Kuramata’s ghost, the spirit of Pesce, and a taste for drapery whose apotheosis would come in the entrance corridor of the Delano Hotel in Miami, opened in 1995. For Starck, the virus was so persistent that it was passed down through lineage: the young artist Ara Starck adopted the motif and extended it across the expansive ceiling of the restaurant at the Hôtel Meurice in 2008. Since this landmark work, the artist has made these textile kaleidoscopes her signature, as the worthy heir to her father and a distant admirer of José Maria Sert.

Conversely, when architect Marc Leschelier drapes his metal structures in cement textile, the austerity is coupled with a dramatic dimension. The thick grey textile describes frozen volutes sinking towards the ground, evoking a post-apocalyptic despair and making Leschelier the architect and sculptor of future ruins, just as Hubert Robert was, in his time, the painter of ruins past.

Drapery as Manifesto

As plastic as it is duplicitous, while becoming the adornment of a relaxed and stripped-down design, drapery also became an ally of the new Postmodernism.

The harbinger of this shift came in the form of the textile façade imagined by the young Rem Koolhaas (36 at the time) for his pavilion installed along the “Strada Novissima”, the Grand-Rue of postmodern aesthetics revealed at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. Unlike its neighbours, which competed with columns and capitals in gelati colours, Koolhaas’s façade was a stretched sheet, one folded corner serving as the entrance to the pavilion. He would acknowledge it himself: the use of this simple undulating sheet was an assertion of his desire not to participate in the surrounding aesthetic escalation, but rather to propose a non-façade, even an anti-façade.

Drapery then returned to Takahama’s imagination. This time, in designing the Nefer lamp in 1986 for the Italian manufacturer Sirrah, the drapery crowns a solid structure of golden brass columns set into a marble base. Drapery is no longer soft and solitary; it is combined with the rigour of an architectural structure, opening up a new era. The same articulation can be found in François Bauchet’s Liliploom chair, whose curved resin seat appears to ripple in the wind while being firmly anchored to a crossed grey metal frame. With this 1985 chair, Bauchet opened up a new imaginary for drapery: that of movement.

Kristian Gavoille was surely thinking of Marilyn’s dress billowing over the subway grate when he designed the Divine table and its petticoat-like base. Denis Santachiara made a blue banner float, propelled by a mechanical Mistral, while Elizabeth de Portzamparc imagined a wave of lacquered MDF rippling along the side of a wall. Gaetano Pesce, meanwhile, offered in 1995 with his Rag lamp one of the first experiments by Fish Design with the material that would become its signature: resin, releasing Kuramata’s ghost and giving it colour.

Domesticated Drapery

While design offered drapery fertile ground in which to deploy its nuances, the appearance of Christo’s first wrapped objects in the late 1950s reopened the field of art to a motif that seemed to have deserted it as abstraction became the universal language of artistic expression. It is striking to see how drapery returned through an artist who would be difficult to categorise as either abstract or figurative.

In Christo’s work, drapery is constrained by ropes whose tension creates a network of folds that become the predominant motif of the work. Looking at a work by Christo, what do we see if not folds, ties, and the rhythm these two elements create with the object (or monument, as in the wrapping of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1969)?

When drapery is free, it becomes pleated when constrained, cinched, or stretched. This lies at the centre of Alexandre Gourçon’s work, who organises pleating around textile fissures that seem, like seams, on the verge of breaking apart. The fact that this palpable tension draws its inspiration from the history of fashion brings us back to the origin of drapery in art: the representation of clothing.

And it is precisely contemporary painters, having returned to figuration, who now combine drapery with great dexterity. In Inès Longevial’s la couleur des heures vécues (2023), the drapery, although suffused with the solarised colours that characterise her palette, manages to conceal immodesty while revealing the model’s anatomy. A paradox that aptly summarises the function of drapery: it conceals as much as it reveals, undresses as much as it clothes.

Emmanuel Berard