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 Architect Robert Stone tailors T-shirts for the human structure. April 2001
But Stone, an architect by training and provocateur by nature, does worry that mass production is causing people to lose sight of the relationship between the consumer and the object. He has explored that connection in past pieces, creating a strap-on subwoofer for the Mercedes Benz 230 SLK (it encourages people to party around a car that is made for showing off) and outfitting L.A. parking lots with skateboard-friendly concrete blocks (they lure skaters with a smooth sloped edge and metal rod that are ideal for tricks). Stone is also building a "luxury motel" in Palm Springs whose public areas (such as the swimming pool) are designed to be settings for "social theater." Whereas these projects deal with a shared social realm, his latest piece looks at the more intimate space between clothes and wearer. He's making custom-fitted T-shirts. Stone tailors ordinary long-sleeved white T-shirts to the client's body, leaving the excess fabric on the outside of the seam to emphasize the difference between the human shape and the original shape of the shirt. Julie Zamaryonov of NYSE, a boutique in the Fairfax neighborhood known for carrying cutting-edge local designers, called the shirts "simple and classic but at the same time chic, not obnoxious or over-the-top trendy." One night last summer the boutique hosted Stone, always happy to take his work outside of the gallery, who fitted T-shirts on eager fashionistas as three seamstresses stood by with industrial sewing machines. He continues to hold fittings by appointment in the boutique and did a second show in November at A Detacher in New York. On an uncharacteristically cold Southern California day I get my very own $75 custom T-shirt--with a moss-colored satin label that reads "R. Stone/Fitted Shirt." Holding my right arm out, Stone pinches the excess fabric and tacks a piece of blue seamstress's tape to the thin white cotton shirt. He does the same with the left arm, and then the sides. "What if someone wants you to make the T-shirt loose?" I ask. Stone stops taping for a minute and looks up. "They don't," he replies emphatically, patting down the last piece of tape. It takes all of ten minutes. "That's it?" "That's it," he says. "Make sure the tape stays when you take it off." The tape doesn't stay, because I am spectacularly uncoordinated, and we have to do a second fitting. But a week later, when Stone and I meet again, he has sewn a perfect outline of my body onto the shirt. When I put it on there is the exact curve of my waist, the same slight swell of my bicep. "Your own shape is superimposed on this [generic] garment," Stone explains. "The seam makes it surprisingly sexy." And how does the shirt hold up outside of the boutique world? "You've got your shirt on inside out, honey," an old lady tells me at the supermarket. My mom says she can see my bra, and a friend thinks it looks "lizardlike." But later that evening, at a gallery opening near NYSE, an older man with a Clark Gable mustache looks over and says, "That shirt. Those seams. It's like a very precise pajama top." |
