Architecture’s Seduction: How Architecture Creates Displays of Fashion to Influence Society

Abstract

Fashion and architecture share a similar problem: how to prove that they have value beyond tangible or material use. This paper focuses on how spaces made to display fashion garments (runways, luxury stores, and museums) use different techniques in order to seduce customers into perceiving value in fashion and then again in architecture. Part I focuses on how spaces of fashion display emphasize value in viewing fashion, through appropriations of art and activations of melancholic feelings, while Part II focuses on how these spaces create fantastical environments that make it desirable to participate in fashion, through proposing ideal, fashionable lives by creating homely fantasies but also through providing safe yet transgressive spaces through the use of spectacle and the uncanny.