Fashion Talks at AUP 2000/21: Between Despair & Hope

Caroline Evans will talk about her most recent anthology, Time in Fashion (2020), co-edited with Alessandra Vaccari, focusing on the three concepts that structure the book: industrial time, antilinear time and uchronic time. Her lecture is part of this year's Fashion Talks at AUP entitled: Between Despair and Hope, organized by Professor Renate Stauss and Professor Sophie Kurkdjian.

Few phenomena embody the notion of time as well as fashion. Fast-moving and rooted in the 'now', fashion is constantly creating its own past through the process of rapid style change. Uniquely poised between the past and the future, fashion’s relationship with time is unorthodox. 

This anthology, rather than considering time in a conventional sense, explores three alternative ways to think about fashion and time: the first identifies the seasonal nature of fashion as an industry, and shows how this has impacted on workers and wearers alike. The second looks at fashion design as a ceaseless process of adaptation, reconstruction and recombination of motifs, in which nostalgia and revivals play their part. The third construes fashion’s 'imaginary', with its capacity for fantasy and myth-making, as a form of alternate history that asks 'what if?'