Marco Pecorari

For Spring Summer 2020, Gucci showed a collection questioning identity politics and capitalism. Rather than the usual explanation of the material, shapes or inspirations behind the collection, the press release handed out at the show quoted the philosopher Michel Foucault and questioned the very nature of fashion itself. Gucci’s press release reflects the popularization of critical theory in public discourse and fashion in particular. Philosophers, activists and academics are increasingly recruited to collaborate with luxury brands, and main-stream fashion brands have begun to adopt a discourse about politics and critical thinking using, in their communication, concepts such as “resistance”, “gender fluidity”, “national identity” or “cultural heritage” without accompanying these discourses with any form of political engagement or activism. Based on this intellectualization of the fashion industry and the recent proliferation of critical theory in fashion education, this book stresses the importance of rethinking the relationship between fashion and theory. Drawing together eleven chapters and four conversations by and with philosophers, cultural theorists, historians, anthropologists, activists, performers and designers, the book investigates both the theorization of fashion and the ways in which fashion offers a useful landscape in understanding the current state of critical theory today.

Historicization, subjectivity and practice

Fashion in theory

Fashion ephemera-from catalogues and invitations to press releases-have long been overlooked by the fashion industry and fashion academics. Fashion Remains redresses the balance, putting these objects centre stage and focusing on the wider creative practice of contemporary fashion designers, photographers, graphic designers, make-up artists, and many more. Fashion ephemera are considered not as disposable promotional devices, but as windows into hidden networks of collaboration and value creation in the fashion system. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Fashion Remains explores the unseen and privately circulated fashion ephemera produced by today's most prominent international fashion designers such as Margiela, Yamamoto, and Raf Simons. Showcasing a unique archive of materials, it focuses on Antwerp's avant-garde fashion scene and reveals the potential of these ephemeral objects to evoke and call into question material and immaterial knowledge about the fashion industry's actors, practices and ideologies.

Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive

Fashion Remains

Andrea Kollnitz

In the first comprehensive study of the interactions between fashion, performance and performativity, a group of international experts explore fashion as the ideal 'complex space' – or, in other words, the ideal space where performance and performativity come together, according to the works of seminal theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker. Bringing together western and non-western, historical and contemporary case studies and theories, the book explores the magazines, photography, exhibitions, global colonial divides, digital media, and more, which have become key markers of the fashion industry as we know it today. Using existing literature as a springboard and incorporating perspectives from fashion studies, art history, media studies and gender studies, as well as from artists and practitioners, Fashion, Performance, and Performativity is an innovative and essential work for students, scholars and practitioners across multiple disciplines.

Marco Pecorari

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