Another season of mannequins performing in expensive fashion finery is on show in Paris this week, as the haute couture shows get under way. The medium and its message – the fashion show, caught on film and in photographs – is over a century old and in the 21st century, the runway show is an event – a spectacle of set design, visual art and a bag of tricks mixed in.
“Although people are trying all these different ways of showing (now) in parallel with, they’re not actually replacing the fashion show,” Caroline Evans, a professor of fashion history and theory at London’s Central Saint Martins, explains on the phone from New York, where she’s doing archive research.
Evans’ new book, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900-1929 (Yale University Press, $50) offers a new way of thinking about the century-old relationship between fashion, film, modernism and motion.
“My first thinking was actually from the 1880s those [Eadward] Muybridge and Marey photographs of motion, the sort of chronos photography of the 1880s,” she continues. “As I worked on the subject I found dance and music history and performance history much more useful for this. The whole thing is about a kind of performativity, really.”
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