Everywhere you look these days fashion designers and architects are teaming up. Rem Koolhaas, the cerebral Dutch architect, designs boutiques for Prada, the cerebral Italian fashion house. Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, who thinks so far out of the box that his buildings appear to lack right angles, designs jewelry for Tiffany, whose fashionable baubles are instantly recognizable by their distinctive blue boxes. Since architects and fashion designers deal with the basic questions of how to construct shelters, meaning clothes and buildings, that are functional and also expressive, it is no wonder that boundaries between the two disciplines are so intriguingly permeable.

In fact, contemporary practitioners of fashion and building design are consciously borrowing from each other. That is the general thesis of the exhilarating show Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture that recently showed at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), in Los Angeles. Brooke Hodge, MOCA’s Curator of Architecture and Design, organized the exhibition and the excellent catalog. In her introductory essay Hodge notes that despite the fact that fashion designers have long been influenced by architecture, “it is only recently that a true cross-fertilization has developed, as architects have in turn begun to pay closer attention to fashion.”

In the generous show of more than three hundred works by forty-five designers and architects, Hodge pairs architectural works, meaning models, drawings and photographs, with apparel to demonstrate what the clothes and buildings have in common. The avant-garde designers and architects represent work in the United States, Europe and Asia. They include such fashion iconoclasts as Issey Miyake, Azzedine Alaia, Hussein Chalayan, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Dries Van Noten, Isabel Toledo, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and Narciso Rodriguez. Architects included in the show are Bernard Tschumi, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas, among others. The work, both the apparel and architecture, dates from the early 1980s to the present. The title of the show, Skin + Bones, refers to the interior and exterior aspects of design that both fashion and building designers take into account during the creative process.

Hodge suggests that not only have architects started borrowing the vocabulary of fashion now that they talk about “draping,” “wrapping,” and “pleating” buildings, but with the newest computer-aided-design software, architects, including Frank Gehry, can model building materials like fabric. Buildings can be folded, draped and made to curve like fabric gliding over a shoulder or hip. Likewise she notes that certain avant-garde fashion designers increasingly work with such architectural concepts as creating volume and using geometry to generate design plans. Some fashion designers also are emulating architects by using three-dimensional modeling software to design clothes. One such clothing designer is Elena Manfredi, a multi-disciplinary designer trained as a civil engineer and architect. Though Manfredi is hardly a name likely to appear in the pages of Vogue, her one-of-a-kind garments featuring textiles decorated with laser-cut patterns are extraordinary.

Some of the parallels Hodge highlights are easy to grasp. She notes that in recent decades some architects have become interested in dramatic surface design simply for the sake of aesthetics. Surface design—textile patterning—has always been important in fashion. But to make her point Hodge includes photographs and a short film about the remodeling of the historic Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona, an open-air hall that the Embt Arquitectes of Barcelona transformed a few years ago into a riot of hot Mediterranean color. The young husband and wife architectural team of Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue added a draping roof tiled in sixty-seven colors based on the colors of the fruit and vegetables sold at the market. What is essentially a roof has been fantastically transformed by the simple addition of surface design. Think of how appliqué can transform a plain piece of textile and you have the fashion equivalent.

A somewhat more convoluted point Hodge makes is to show how certain fashion designers and architects use geometry to devise unusual forms and spatial relationships. Architects such as Peter Eisenman of New York have experimented with twisted shapes for buildings, and fashion designers, including Isabel Toledo, use geometry to turn full circles and perfect squares of fabric into clothing with organic shapes. In both cases geometry is directly used to suss out unexpected design possibilities.

Hodge also notes that architects and fashion designers were equally fascinated by the idea of “deconstruction,” which came about in the 1980s after French philosopher Jacques Derrida developed his theories about “deconstructing” literature as a way to rid literary criticism of cultural bias. The Japanese designers Yamamoto and Kawakubo, who presented their first Paris shows in the early 1980s, were among the first of the fashion “deconstructionists” with their frayed edges and unfinished seams. At about the same time architect Bernard Tschumi designed a much-acclaimed “deconstructed” urban park, the Parc de la Villette in Paris. The park’s master plan included thirty-five freestanding pavilions scattered throughout the park but linked by paths—a deconstruction of a traditional park plan. The comparison works.

Given the conceptual nature of the show, it is easy to understand why some of the architecture shown in models or drawings have never actually been built. Many architects with groundbreaking ideas, such as Zaha Hadid, have had difficulty actually getting the ground broken to start their projects. Clients sometimes balk at the extreme designs and the blueprints are shelved indefinitely. Apparel, on the other hand, is relatively easy to make at least once, and Skin + Bones is filled with wonderful garments that probably were never made more than a few times. Virtually all of the apparel in the show is haute couture, meaning that after it is presented in fashion shows it is reproduced only when specifically ordered by a private client.

Still, for anyone intrigued by clothing design, seeing clothes up close by such revolutionaries as Miyake, Yamamoto, Rodriguez, and Toledo is a treat. Included are numerous dresses by Ralph Rucci, a remarkable American designer of haute couture known for a series of dresses he calls Infanta Gowns, which he says were inspired by the aristocratic dresses in Diego Velazquez’s famous 1656 painting Las Meninas. Rucci has a fondness for silk gazar, which he coaxes into sculptural waterfalls cascading from the waists of his dresses.

Likewise he uses heavy silk jersey to create sleek columnar dresses that hint at Elsa Schiaparelli and Geoffrey Beene. Rucci’s work is exquisite and he also happens to be the subject of a retrospective currently on display at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

There are aspects of Skin + Bones that are purely performance art, such as Hussein Chalayan’s 2000-2001 group of living room furniture that is cleverly transformed into skirts and suitcases for a quick getaway. A film loop shows models standing in a room furnished with a simple, Ikea-ish living room ensemble. Then, quickly, the models snap, twist and button the slipcovers of the chairs into dresses and the chairs fold up to become suitcases. A rounded coffee table telescopes into a bell-shaped skirt for one of the models. The performance makes a political point about the need of refugees to pack up and leave their homes quickly. Chalayan is himself a Turkish Cypriot whose career has been made in London. He is well versed in what happens when cultures intersect, both artistically and politically. Like so much else in Skin + Bones, Chalayan’s filmed piece and his furniture/escape wardrobe opens our eyes to the limitless possibilities for fashion and architecture in the twenty-first century.

The Museum of Contemporary Art is located at 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90012; www.moca.org. Photographs by Chris Moore, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.