Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness

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.