2013年7月3日星期三
Birth of a fashion nation: The Mechanical Smile explores the lasting influence of early 1900s haute couture models
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.”
订阅:
博文评论 (Atom)
没有评论:
发表评论