Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness

by Caroline Evans

Experimental fashion has a dark side, a preoccupation with representations of death, trauma, alienation and decay. This seminal publication offers an unexpected discussion of cutting-edge fashion in the 1990s, exploring what its disturbing themes tell us about consumer culture and contemporary anxieties. Caroline Evans analyses the work of innovative designers, the images of fashion photographers and the spectacular fashion shows that developed in the final decade of the twentieth century to arrive at a new understanding of fashion’s dark side and what it signifies. Fashion at the Edge considers a range of ground- breaking fashion in unprecedented depth and detail, including the work of such designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Viktor & Rolf, and photographers such as Steven Meisel, Nick Knight and Juergen Teller. Drawing on diverse perspectives from Marx to Walter Benjamin, Evans shows that fashion stands at the very centre of the contemporary, and that it voices some of Western culture’s deepest concerns.

Genres: Fashion, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, Fashion History, Cultural, History

334 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

Reviews

[Francesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

the most glamorous women I know are reading about fashion!

reading fashion theory and implicating philosophical and political intellectualisms into my limited knowledge of the world of fashion is one of my ‘goals’ for the year. I really want to cultivate a deep cultural knowledge of all the most culturally significant fashion walks and shows and the sociopolitical undercurrents implicit in them. Fashion mediates everything !

‘This is not to say that fashionable people are shallow as individuals, but that consumer culture mediates social relations so as to encourage shallowness.’

I wrote my philosophy dissertation on the
spiritual dullness of visual media consumption in a consumer culture so reading about the same concept through the fissures in the fashion industry was just really interesting to me. fashion intellectualism is really fantastic.

[JOE · Rating 1 out of 5]

worth looking at for great photography and mcqueen fanaticism but caroline evans represents the great pitfall of contemporary fashion journalism

quote after quote to signal some vague notion of literacy but no real meat in the commentary she writes herself

edit: a picture of connie fleming is labeled as being rupaul. just laughable.

[Salomé · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep dive into clothes ? Not too much. But theoretical framing of understanding avant-garde fashion as an institution, as historiography, as a symptom of capitalism, and as an aspect of modernity ? Yes.

[cecilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Caroline Evans wrote a book that not only inspired me to write about my most complicated relationship: fashion. Reading fashion theory is a love of mine, the connections of modernity, capitalism and the modern anxieties with the desing of the twentieth century. Glorious

[Celka R · Rating 2 out of 5]

Evans has really great references in literature in critical theory, as well as in fashion designers, and her book is worth a read just as a directory for other readings. However she isn’t particularly rigorous in connecting those references to the fashion of the 1990s. To many fashion happenings that I believe were caused by a complex net of trends based in reactions to previous trends, shifts in societal activities, shifts in available production techniques and materials, etc., are framed as a reaction on the part of designers of the 1990s to the horrors of industrial capitalism, echoes of similar reactions to the horrors of industrial capitalism in the late 1800s. As such there’s a real lack of nuanced consideration of why clothes looked the way they did during the decade.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

i wish there were more books like this ... perfect !!

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good analysis of the more decadent trends in fashion today, although the writing style is more dense than I could give attention too. Fabulous images.