'Only great minds can afford a simple syle.'

I remember discovering Erwin Wurm after seeing the Red Hot Chilli Peppers video that claimed to be inspired by his work in which the band members placed their bodies into brief, absurd marriages with various objects. For me Wurm's One Minute Sculptures -thoughtful physical engagements with marker pens, plastic bottles and waste paper bins- always kept me amused and curious as to his intentions but it was the way he used clothing in sculpture that charmed me. Stretching it, shrinking it, reshaping it and reinventing its use, Wurm's artistic relationship with the humble pullover could easily be described as slapstick, and indeed on the surface he has been considered art's top-billing comedian. Along with his obese houses, spaceship cars and warped transit trucks it's not hard to see why I took him for an all round cynic who expressed his contempt with banality by making it laughable.

I recently read an interview with Wurm in which he explained how embracing comedy felt daring, important and subversive. He spoke about the essential rebellion of reading comics as a child. They were forbidden in school in the '50s and their contents considered incendiary. But I was more interested in learning that his father was a police detective who felt that an entrance into the art world would be irrevocably tied to criminality. It made me wonder if Wurm's insurgence against his environment helped him to navigate a pathway through tongue-in-cheek sculptural narrations and childish visual absurdity and ultimately to his bottom line, which could be that ordinary objects hold magical qualities and that the imagination is more easily unlocked than many of us accept.

So a few days ago I was pleasantly baffled by the editorial directed by Wurm in the March issue of Wallpaper magazine. And suddenly I was thinking, 'Yes! Of course, this guy is the perfect person to work on a fashion editorial! What is a pose if not a one minute physical sculpture? What is style if not a fleeting statement of power and permanence?'

Is it me or do these images as an overall project seem to work on two equally valid levels? On the one hand there's a small-scale-smaller-budget, community project atmosphere present. This sense that there's just a room, a camera and a box of clothes left to a bunch of creatives who have one big chance to take the whole concept of a fashion shoot to another planet. Yet, there's also real poignancy on offer. The clothes are being experienced. There is no trace of passivity, instead every shot is pumped with a passion for texture, colour, material and durability. Bringing a sculptor to the task of shooting clothes has donated an often absent sense of exploration which succeeds to make the material seem close enough to touch.

Emmanuel Kant said that for something to qualify as truly beautiful in essence it has to transcend purpose. Its rightness of design should satiate our imagination and intellect without evaluating its reason. He suggested that any judgement of beauty could be instantly contaminated by desire. If an incredibly ripe strawberry makes you want to eat it or a particularly red rose makes you want to pluck it and wear it in your hair then you're not appreciating these items for their beauty but only for the pleasure they offer. If I was to apply this evaluation technique to clothes in a fashion editorial, Wurm would be my art director of choice. To take beautiful, well-made clothing to a place of excellent presentation without encouraging the viewer to want it, to need it, to be unable to imagine the dull reality of life without it, is to ask the viewer to see the clothes more as art and less as commodity.

Granted, the entire fashion industry from the bottom upwards could crumble if this kind of result was commonplace, but it just gives me something to think about..