Caroline Evans will talk about her anthology, Time in Fashion (2020), co-edited with Alessandra Vaccari, focusing on the three concepts that structure the book. The first, industrial time, identifies the seasonal nature of fashion as an industry, and shows how this has impacted workers and wearers alike. The second, antilinear time, looks at fashion design as a ceaseless process of adaptation, reconstruction and the recombination of motifs, in which nostalgia and revivals play their part. The third, uchronic time, construes fashion’s ‘imaginary’, with its capacity for fantasy and myth-making, as a form of alternate history, which asks the question ‘What if?’ The talk is framed by a discussion of time as a construct and a commodity in the global-Western context.
Caroline Evans is a fashion historian and professor emerita at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London). Her books include Women and Fashion (1989), Fashion at the Edge (2003), The Mechanical Smile (2013) and Time in Fashion (2020). She was a visiting professor at Stockholm University and IUAV University of Venice, and has acted as a museum consultant on several international fashion exhibitions. She co-curated the most recent exhibition at MoMu, Antwerp, Exploding Fashion.
Organised by Dr Elizabeth Kutesko (The Courtauld and Central St Martins)
