Caroline Evans is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. A major voice amongst fashion academics, she is the author and editor of numerous books, including Fashion at the Edge (2003) and Fashion
Caroline Evans is Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. A major voice amongst fashion academics, she is the author and editor of numerous books, including Fashion at the Edge (2003) and Fashion and Modernity (co-edited with Christopher Breward, 2005). Her upcoming book, Modelling Modernism: Mechanical Smiles and Mobile Bodies, deals with the history of early fashion shows between 1900 and 1929, and is due out in autumn this year.
How would you connect fashion to elegance?
I don’t think I would. Actually, being elegant is not very fashionable right now. Historically, elegance was something that people studied: it was an attitude of the body. You would have fencing masters, dancing masters... So there is whole social meaning concerning bodily elegance, that I think is completely gone. Which is why fashion models are so interesting, because they are so artificial. Fashion people tend to think much more of what people wear, and I don’t think that we have the same conception of elegance as something you can acquire. Not that people aren’t elegant, of course they are, but I don’t think it’s particular relevant in fashion.
"Being elegant is not very fashionable right now"
What is the role of history and art history in your conception of fashion?
History is really inherent to fashion, precisely because it is so much about now and change. It has to be predicated on something from which it changes. So in a sense, without history, there is no fashion. That’s why the utopian moves towards a new form of dress, as in the Soviet Union, can’t really create fashion. As far as art history is concerned, well, it is a discipline. You can use its methods. Fashion is representation, so it does relate to art history, but it is also an embodied practice. You can look at a lot of ideas from cultural history, critical theory, that you put together in order to build an apparatus.
Would you describe fashion as a language and a discourse, as Barthes did it?
Language and discourse are two separate things. It’s a little reductive to use the idea of fashion as a language, as if it were something you can translate. There’s a more sophisticated theoretical apparatus that you could draw on, with ideas such as embodiment or performativity. I love Barthes, he has been one of the most important writers for me, but I would strongly differentiate between the early and the later Barthes. I don’t really like the Système de la mode very much, and I don’t really think it’s about fashion. It’s really about semiotics, and it’s written at a time when he’s trying to find a new theoretical language, which also makes sense in the context of what he did in a more populist way with Mythologies. As a book about fashion, I don’t think it’s great. S/Z and A Lover’s Discourse are much richer. I buy the idea, but not the practice of that book. Lastly, discourse: I know he talks about fashion as a discourse. I would extend the question to say: of course, you can write five books about a Foucaldian discourse of fashion. There are hundreds of discourses: there is journalistic discourse, academic discourse, visual discourse – something with which Foucault did not really engage. Actually, most of our PhD students find Foucault very useful.
The word "intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress. Does fashion have a political role? And in which way?
Yes, because everything is politics. What I would do is perhaps split my answer between production and consumption. In terms of production, there are political, economic issues, in terms of how it’s produced globally, some of them very disgraceful and very shocking. In terms of consumption, I think it’s a little more complicated. I’m someone who came of age in the second wave of feminism, during the 60s and the 70s. I think the most groundbreaking slogan of that time was: "the personal is political". The political doesn’t just take place in the Parliament or in the streets, it takes place above all, in terms of gender politics, in the bedroom and in the kitchen. Of course, in those days we never extended those arguments to the closet, but, in a sense, I think I would.
How would you relate the concept of "fashion" to the one of "style"?
People in fashion use the word "style" in the sense of being stylish, just as a way of putting clothes together, whereas of course in art history, there is a whole history of style. It’s as if you had one word and two different sets of meaning. I am not sure that I do relate those two concepts.
What does fashion have to do with intellectuality?
I don’t know. Nothing. Maybe it’s a different muscle. For instance, I’m someone who lives very much in my head. I did a class in pattern-cutting, I loved it, I thought I used a different part of my brain. It’s like the pleasure music can give you.
You have worked extensively on the relationship between fashion and modernism. Could fashion be theorised, and how?
Because I am an art historian, who mutated to an historian of visual culture, I am actually against this tendency for reductive one-sentence definitions of what fashion is and how you can theorise it. Of course, one can theorise it, but my answer would be more a series of side steps than a grand total theory. I am more interested in theory as a tool that I would bring to bear on a particular set of questions. I’m much more interested in looking at the thing itself.
"I am actually against the tendency for reductive one-sentence definitions of what fashion is and how you can theorise it"
Fashion shows have a whole history, but, for economic reasons and in relation to the new medias, their existence has sometimes been questioned. What is your opinion on that issue?
I have a lot of colleagues who are interested in fashion films, as an emerging genre competing with fashion shows. However, I don’t think that fashion films and that whole new technology that designers and companies have played with in the last five years or so are ever going to replace the fashion show itself. It’s not just because of the immediacy and the excitement, the theatrical quality to it. It’s also about exclusivity: the fashion show really does always trade off that. Although it plays with opening up access through new media, it also periodically retrenches and pulls back. The new media haven’t replaced meeting people in the flesh.
In two weeks Donatien will be interviewing the fashion and art photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.
