City Research Online

Abstract

In Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans places the past and present in conversation to investigate 1990s fashion’s obsession with the spectacular, the apocalyptic and the melancholic. Drawing on Ulrich Lehmann and Barbara Burman Baines’s writing on fashion revivals, she reads the citation of historical imagery by designers such as Alexander McQueen, Walter Van Beirendonck and Hussein Chalayan as ‘not so much a backwards as a forwards glance’: a contemporary projection of fears of the future and a collective response to the nihilism arising from the sensation of sitting at the end of history. Fitting, then, that on the event of Fashion at the Edge’s reissue, we return to a work that has become something of a cult classic the world over. Twenty years after it was originally published, Caroline and I sat down to discuss the book in the context of a very different fashion landscape and question why fashion imagery is now less informed by themes of cruelty and deathliness, despite the ongoing persistence of collective anxiety and trauma.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© Findlay, R., 2025. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in International Journal of Fashion Studies, 11(2), pp. 319-327, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00115_7.
Publisher Keywords:	1990s fashion; Alexander McQueen; fashion as performance; fashion photography; fashion shows; media archaeology
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform N Fine Arts > NK Decorative arts Applied arts Decoration and ornament
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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