Surface Strategies and Constructive Line: Preferential Planes, Contour, Phenomenal Body in the Work of Bacon, Chalayan, Kawakubo

The paper investigates Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of body and space and Gilles Deleuze's reading of Francis Bacon's work, in order to derive a renegotiated interrelation between habitual body, phenomenal space, preferential plane and constructive line. The resulting system is applied as a filter to understand the sartorial fashion of Rei Kawakubo and Hussein Chalayan and their potential as a spatial prosthesis: the operative third skin. If the evolutionary nature of culture demands a constant change, how does the surface of a third skin, which embodies the generative of stable/unstable, respond to changes of context?