A flâneur’s stroll through New York’s Soho and Tribeca might take in a visit to Rem Koolhaas’s theatrical Prada “epicenter” superstore, Frank Gehry’s Issey Miyake store and Future Systems’ sci-fi interior for Comme des Garçons. In Tokyo, a short amble through Aoyama could include a glimpse through the glacier mint windows of Herzog de Meuron’s Prada, the jagged frame of Toyo Ito’s Tod’s and the shimmering net curtain facade of Jun Aoki’s Louis Vuitton. Either city should be enough to convince you that fashion and architecture are two worlds deeply in love with each other.

Skin+Bones, an exhibition at London’s Somerset House, attempts to expose this symbiosis through a juxtaposition of avant-garde architecture and fashion. In many ways clothes and architecture do similar things: both protect and house the body, project an image of the wearer and locate the individual in a (sub)culture and society. Whether you take the flowing robes of a Greek caryatid abstracted into the fluting of an ionic column or the sensuous drapes of an Issey Miyake shawl morphing into a diaphanous facade by Foreign Office architects, there is a clear formal relationship between building and clothing. Even their contemporary vocabulary overlaps; talk of fabric, wrapping, folding, weaving, of tectonics and intelligent materials seamlessly merge into a single language.