Fashion Talks at AUP Continues with Caroline Evans, Time in Fashion

On Wednesday, March 10, 2021, this year’s Fashion Talks at AUP lecture series, entitled “Between Despair and Hope,” continued with a presentation by Caroline Evans of her latest anthology, Time in Fashion (co-edited with Alessandra Vaccari). The event was organized by Professor Renate Stauss and Professor Sophie Kurkdjian of the Department of Communication, Media and Culture.

The anthology, rather than considering time in a conventional sense, explores alternative ways to think about time in the context of fashion. Caroline first introduced notions of time as a construct and commodity in the global-Western context, before focusing on the three sections of 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?”

Connecting and juxtaposing visual and textual references from different disciplines – philosophy, history, literature, fashion design and media – ranging from the 18th century to the present, Caroline inspired the audience to think about time differently – both in terms of fashion and more broadly.