Landscape design and fashion share a close relationship between creative vision, material understanding and skilled artistry. Both explore proportion, colour, texture and movement, with the finished result shaped by collaboration between designers and the specialists who bring their ideas to life.
Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art explores this process in After Steps Through Work: Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985, revisiting the exhibition that celebrated the first twenty years of their partnership. Its journey from initial inspiration through design development to the finished garment offers a revealing parallel with creating a garden, where every detail must work both visually and practically.
Garden landscape and fashion exhibition design: The creative process
In fashion and landscape design, drawing is a way of exploring ideas. Lagerfeld’s sketches reveal how an initial thought develops through studies of shape, proportion and detail. Garden designers work in much the same way, using sketches to explore the relationship between spaces, architecture and planting before refining the wider composition.
Sample boards bring another dimension to this process. Fendi and Lagerfeld’s experiments draw on Rome’s skyline, floral motifs and geometric patterns, exploring how colour, texture and materials work together. In landscape design, material samples and planting palettes help establish the character of a garden, considering how contrasting surfaces, foliage and forms will sit alongside one another.
This experimentation with samples plays a comparable role in fashion to 3D modelling software in landscape design. Both help designers move beyond the initial sketch to explore how an idea will take shape in three dimensions. Whether working with fabric or a digital model of a garden, the aim is to test proportion, texture and depth, refining the creative vision before it is made.
The design framework: Testing form, structure and materials
The exhibition’s design frameworks reveal how ideas are tested before the finished garment is made. Simple canvas and black tape form toiles -trial versions used to explore shape, construction and fit, and to identify details that need further refinement. This process has a parallel in garden design, where CAD drawings and digital models help resolve proportions, levels and structural relationships before construction begins.
The lines and geometric patterns of the toiles also suggest possibilities for a landscape: the curve of a planting bed, the rhythm of hedging or the contours of changing ground levels. In both disciplines, experimentation helps establish how materials will behave and whether they can realise the intended design. For a landscape designer, that assessment also considers growing conditions, weathering, environmental impact and how the garden will develop over time.
Theatrical eye catching layouts
The exhibition’s theatre brings the creative process into focus, with fur coats suspended on a mechanical pulley system at different heights and depths. The shifting viewpoints reveal new relationships between form, texture and movement, bringing together the results of Fendi and Lagerfeld’s experimentation.
A completed garden offers a similar experience. Views change as you move through it, materials respond to the light, and planting reveals different layers of the composition. Behind this apparent ease lies detailed research, technical planning and skilled execution.
In both fashion and landscape design, the strength of the original idea depends on the people who interpret, refine and realise it. It is this relationship between creative vision and craftsmanship that gives the finished work its distinctive character.
Fashion and landscape design share an understanding of proportion, materials and personal expression. Looking at garden design through the lens of fashion reveals the thought, experimentation and craftsmanship behind a finished space-and the individual details that make it feel personal. At PC Landscapes, we bring the same care to understanding each client, creating gardens that respond to the architecture while reflecting the lives, tastes and aspirations of the people who use them.
Arrange a consultation with our team to bring the power of fashion and theatre to your landscape.