Volume 2, Issue 1, #12 - 2019

Abstract:

Today’s fashion film is often assumed to be an entirely new form that emerged in the digital age, but in fact it has a long history going back to the time of the first film, around 1900, and this lecture will bring together examples of both to tease out some connections. It draws on methods from “media archaeology” to argue that fashion film is a multi-layered construction in which past and present are interwoven in what Michel Foucault called “a history of the present.” The talk is drawn from Caroline’s collaborative research project “Archaeology of Fashion Film.” The project is based at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). 

Author Biography

Caroline Evans is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

She is the author of The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (2013) and Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness (2003), among many other publications. Current research projects attend to the idea of “fashion gesture”; a media archaeological approach to fashion history via film; and an exploration of the relations between technologies of the body and of pattern-cutting.

Article Citation

Evans, Caroline. “Fashion Film: The Grain of the Past in the Present.” 21 October 2019, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada. Guest Lecture. Fashion Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, www.fashionstudies.ca/fashion-film/.

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