Instead, everything seemed streamlined in cut, from the wide-shoulder jackets at the show's start to the corduroy coats, often with a tunic like a draped scarf underneath.
But just as this flow of motion unravels a chain of horizontal lines across the stage, the video, with large-scale dancers executing the same steps as the live performers on a black-and-white grid, completes the design like a draping technique.
The Americans got stalwart goaltending from Betsey Armstrong, a 6-footer who covered the goal mouth like a human drape.
One recent creation is a court shoe with a plissé finish in bright blue eel skin that is stretched onto the upper like a taught drape.
It has all seemed so joyless at times, with so many long, difficult periods when it has seemed like a black drape could be placed over the entire team it might surprise you to learn that when Gareth Southgate took his seat in the Stadion Stozice and set out his reasons for dropping Wayne Rooney it was seven years to the day since England had lost a qualifying fixture.
In "Behind the Myth of Benevolence" a portrait of a silver-haired man is peeled back like a fallen drape, revealing behind it a nude depiction of a black woman, gazing at the viewer.
Ann Barr discloses that her former colleague, the columnist Betty Kenward, liked to drape a sheet across the glass wall of her office, to shield her eyes from the sight of girls who, "though top-drawer, did not wash".
Front's entry was exuberantly baroque: a curtain wall that drapes extravagantly, like a curtain of glass.
"It's like a seamstress draping fabric -- you can't do it on someone lying down".
The building has a gallery space that hosts pop-up shows, including an exhibition for Open Studios artists last fall that featured abstract paintings, off-kilter sculptures and a mannequin of a woman — striped like a zebra, draped on a sofa.
