Hussein Chalayan’s Spring/Summer 2007 show, titled One Hundred & Eleven, was staged during Paris Fashion Week on October 2, 2006. Held at the grand École des Beaux-Arts, the show marked a pivotal moment in fashion history, blending the boundaries between technology, fashion, and performance art. This collection, perhaps Chalayan's most iconic, was a tribute to a century of women’s fashion and its evolution through radical transformations. By marrying couture with advanced robotics, Chalayan distilled a century’s worth of cultural, political, and aesthetic transitions into a collection that was both visually stunning and philosophically profound.
The collection’s concept revolved around time, memory, and metamorphosis, using fashion as a medium to narrate the journey of dress from 1900 to 2007. Each piece embodied a particular era, gradually transforming through a series of mechanical transitions. Chalayan’s vision was realized through pioneering collaboration with the engineering company 2D3D, whose expertise in animatronics enabled garments to morph and reshape in real-time. These transformations took place on the runway, drawing gasps from the audience as dresses shifted before their eyes, as though passing through eras in an instant.
The transformative dress—a piece of clothing that could mechanically alter itself into a new silhouette—was the masterpiece of the show. Worn by models toward the end of the presentation, it went through complex changes, from Victorian-era drapery to sleek 1920s flapper styles, and then into minimalist 1960s cuts. This spectacle was made possible by embedded motors and fabric manipulation that allowed the dress to seamlessly shift without the model having to exit the stage. This particular garment illustrated Chalayan’s belief in clothing as an extension of the self, where the garment is not static but evolves, like the wearer, through time and experience.
