Caroline Evans Fashion at the Edge

'Spectres: When Fashion Turns Dorsum', fashion installation

24 February–8 May 2005

'The word 'spectacle' designates a sight or show; the spectre a ghost or vision. Etymologically they have the aforementioned root, both coming from the word 'specere' to run into …' (Caroline Evans, Mode at the Edge: 50)

Spectres set out to reveal the shadows and experiences that formed a 'style memory' in contemporary dress. In showing the hidden, nevertheless haunting, connections between recent fashion and its past, information technology used pieces fatigued from avant-garde designers, from the V&A style drove and from the archive at ModeMuseum in Antwerp.

Set upwards as a series of seven fairground attractions, Spectres invited the visitors into a labyrinth of associations: a shadow lantern throws silhouettes, enlarged maquettes look like games for grown-ups, rotating cogs brand and break patterns.

When creating this experimental show, style curator Judith Clark invited fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo to provide the drawings, avant-garde jeweller Naomi Filmer to create mannequin prosthetics and mode theorist Caroline Evans to lend quotations that evoke the complexity of dress today.

'Phantasmagoria: The Amazing Lost and Plant', photography by Ronald Stoops. Featuring an evening wearing apparel past Christian Dior, 1955. Museum no. T.118-1974

'Pepper's Ghost' for the exhibition Spectres: When Fashion Turns Dorsum, 2004. Photography by Ronald Stoops

Reappearances: getting things back

'…as the labyrinth doubles dorsum on itself what is most mod is revealed every bit likewise having a relation to what is most sometime. Thus distant points in fourth dimension tin can become proximate at specific moments as their paths run close to each other.' (Caroline Evans, Style at the Edge: 9)

'Reappearances: Getting Things Back', rear view of the labyrinth. Photography by Ronald Stoops (click image for larger version)

'Reappearances: Getting Things Back', item of the labyrinth. Photography by Ronald Stoops

This offset section looks at patterns in historical dress, where motifs return and fourth dimension folds back on itself to form a labyrinthine pattern. To experience the haunting of contemporary fashion by its past, the viewer looks through optical devices that pick out details of the dress. Distorted elements are brought into the present, context is discarded.

Seven views are set up upwards: magnifying, reflecting, selecting, doubling the objects through the peepholes. They remind united states of looking games, with each game suggesting different ways a designer might edit the past to create new designs.

Nostalgia

'We claim that the nostalgic human, in his zipper to the past, searches for his lost childhood from where he is henceforth exiled.

Yes, no question. Merely I think that his homesickness has another source. It'due south not the past that he idealizes; it isn't the present on which he turns his back but on what is dying.

His wish: that anywhere - whether he changes continents, cities, jobs, loves - he could discover his native land, the one where life is born, is reborn. Nostalgia carries the desire, less for an unchanging eternity than for always fresh beginnings. Thus time that passes and destroys tries to take away the ideal figure of a place that remains. The homeland is one of the metaphors of life.' (J.B. Pontalis, Fenêtres: 100)

Hither fleeting moments in way are idealised into monuments. Giant wooden figures, taken from Ruben Toledo's drawing The Artery of Silhouettes, loom in a higher place the visitor.

The exhibition questions whether nostalgia is hoping for a forgotten past, or longing for impossible futures. Are the silhouettes those of historical dresses, or of designs for future dresses? Behemothic iron locks and keys promise routes behind these doors into other ideas.

Locking in and out

'Locking in and Out', cogs with dresses for Spectres: When Fashion Turns Dorsum, 2005

'It was not that the by only illuminated the nowadays, or that the nowadays illuminated the past; rather the ii images came together in a 'critical constellation' tracing a previously curtained connexion.' (Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: 33)

The by is brought into the foreground through quotation of its motifs, silhouettes, decoration. Where past and present pieces meet or interlock, in that location is an uncanny recognition. When they diverge, they are again remote.

Half-dozen themes are acted out on three huge cogs, moving incessantly like the fashion system itself. Style is promiscuous in its references, never resting on one idea. It can't beget to get stuck or be predictable. The question is, how does mode continue unlocking itself?

The section nods to Anna Piaggi's Doppie Pagine (double page spread), in which she names trends for Italian Vogue each month. She finds the clues that link disparate dresses on the catwalk. Here they are: Victoriana, Tartan, Bohemia, Designs for Dresses, Flags, and Futuristic.

A new distress

Dress, 1875–1900. MOMU: T93/381AB

'A nowadays haunted past the image of ruin in the future…' (Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: 56)

The worn out, the torn apart, or burned and stained are the cloth for the new distress - distress hither pregnant both the signs of trauma and the show of clothing and tear. In re-creating these furnishings, a disturbing past is referred to. Something ruined is beingness recovered. Nosotros find a use for the things we had discarded and are intrigued by what is cute about them. Contemporary dress takes its inspiration from ageing of the textile itself, a different kind of history.

An un-conserved hymeneals clothes is laid out like a giant doll on a hospital operating table. Naomi Filmer turns cleaved limbs into precious objects of desire.

Remixing information technology: the past in pieces

'And in the same way that musical history lost its linearity when mixed by the DJ…so too did fashion and cultural history lose its linearity when 'remixed' by tardily twentieth-century designers folding one historical reference back on some other. Rather than recreating one catamenia, [the] historical borrowings were multi-layered…rummaging through the historical wardrobe to produce dress with a strictly mod resonance.' (Caroline Evans, Style at the Border: 25)

'Remixing Information technology: The Past In Pieces' from the exhibition Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, 2005

'Remixing Information technology: The By In Pieces' from the exhibition Spectres: When Style Turns Back, 2005

Fashion is tin can exist shamelessly irreverent in its use of the past. Contemporary styling often combines the old and the new, the formal and the inappropriate, the trivial and the elegant. Old themes are worn equally new details. Ruben Toledo's painted sections allude to a children's game of parts, as though the visitor were costless to change the combinations. Many of the pieces in the display were found in Portobello Route, London's famous secondhand market place used past stylists.

Phantasmagoria: the amazing lost and found

'The term 'phantasmagoria' was kickoff used in 1802 to describe another form of popular spectacle… a magic lantern bear witness in which skeletons, ghosts and other fantastical figures were made to rapidly increase and decrease in size… metaphorically it came to connote some course of dramatic visual deception or display, in which shadowy and unreal figures appear…' (Caroline Evans, Style at the Edge: 89)

'Marionette Theatre' for the exhibition Spectres: When Fashion Turns Dorsum, 2005

'The Magic Lantern' for the exhibition Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, 2005

The circus fairground and magic are the ground for this installation - a disused merry-become-round, a marionette theatre and a revolving shadow testify. The tricks of the circus, the typecasting of the harlequin and the shape-shifting of the shadow all distract u.s.a. from history, masking its details.

Naomi Filmer, preparation sketch of masks to be made in resin, 2004

Naomi Filmer, preparation sketch of harlequin feet to be made in wood, 2004

'Curiouser and curiouser'

'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak skillful English); 'now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!' (Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: chapter 2)

'Curiosity Cabinet' for the exhibition Spectres: When Fashion Turns Dorsum, 2005

Item of the 'Curiosity Chiffonier' for the exhibition Spectres: When Way Turns Dorsum, 2005

Historic period is here associated with scale. The child's and woman's dress are like scaled-upwards dolls' clothes, speaking of the feet of ageing. A giant marvel cabinet houses a collection of historic games. Babyhood is throughout the exhibition a motif for the by, our ain past. This section as well refers to the past of the museum itself - a curiosity cabinet.

'Idea for a giant spinning wheel of manner', cartoon by Ruben Toldeo, 2003

The collaborators

Collaboration has always been an essential function of fashion curation for Judith Clark and this is especially apparent for the exhibition Spectres where the enormous influence of way theorist Caroline Evans; fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo and jeweller Naomi Fulmer are in evidence.

Judith Clark trained in Compages at the Bartlett School of Architecture and at the Architectural Association, London. Her shift towards fashion curation began every bit she realised the parallels between the design and dressing of spaces with that of dressing the human form.

Caroline Evans is Reader in Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, London. She teaches and writes on 20th century and current fashion.

Ruben Toledo Ruben Toledo paints, sculpts, illustrates and draws. His work has been exhibited in museums such every bit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cloth museum at the Louvre and the museum at the Fashion Establish of Engineering.

Naomi Filmer holds a Senior Research Fellowship at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design; she has taught in the jewellery and fashion departments of Central Saint Martin's, The Royal College of Art and elsewhere.

Written to accompany the exhibition Spectres: When Mode Turns Back, on brandish at the V&A South Kensington between 24 February and eight May 2005.

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