Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
24 February - 8 May 2005

Notes To Exhibition Sections

A Repertoire of Repetitions

'...A life as an idiosyncratic repertoire of repetitions; and the account of the life always already ironised by the Freudian knowingness of the narrator. The details of a life, of course, can never be predicted; nor can the content or the exact working of the repetitions [ ]. But what can be assumed is that there will be repetitions, and that these repetitions found their initial and initiating) forms in childhood. ...[]. Our lives may be turbulent, but it is a patterned, if not actually a structured turbulence.'
Adam Phillips; Childhood Again, Equals, Faber & Faber, London 2002

Reappearances: Getting Things Back

There are clearly many ways of describing and illustrating how the past shows up in the present. In this project I want to look at what happens when you map contemporary fashion and importantly contemporary fashion theory onto the history of dress; to look at the ways in which the past haunts and foreshadows the present. In these six excerpts from possible genealogies, in these unexpected combinations of images and disciplines we can browse for clues about exhibiting dress. And what else we might be suggesting when dress is displayed?

In this section, which includes optical devices, labyrinths and instruments to manipulate distance, I want to consider what we are doing when we look at the past and how our looking might be visualised. Each of these objects both aid and distort the ways we look back. We are always rooted in our point of view, looking from somewhere in particular with purposes in mind. Looking always transforms what it sees.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is satisfying because it is a longing for a past that never existed and for a future that can never be. As a fantasy you can make the past any way you want to. Nostalgia and a sense of impossibility go together. For the nostalgic the repertoire is infinite in the quest to keep pleasure alive. In fashion a monument can only ever be a monument to a moment.

We claim that the nostalgic man, in his attachment to the past, searches for his lost childhood, this mythical time of childhood from where he is henceforth exiled. Yes, no question. But I think that his homesickness has another source. Its not the past that he idealizes; it isn't the present on which he turns his back but on what is dying. His wish: that anywhere - whether he changes continents, cities, jobs, loves - he could find his native land, the one where life is born, is reborn. Nostalgia carries the desire, less for an unchanging eternity than for always fresh beginnings. Thus time that passes and destroys tries to take away the ideal figure of a place that remains. The homeland is one of the metaphors of life.
Nostalgia - J-B Pontalis, Windows, University of Nebraska Press, 2003

Locking In and Out

Fashion by definition has a promiscuous memory; it locks into things and it locks out with surprising speed. Uncanny recognitions and unpredictable conjunctions are integral to the fashion machine. Fashion can't afford to get stuck, but it also can't afford to be predictable. The question is how does fashion keep unlocking itself. In this compulsive love affair with the past, the past is alternately familiar and alien.

Phantasmagoria: The Amazing Lost and Found

In the fantasy past clothes can be anything we want them to be. In this conjuring of dress, clothes fit the body as a shadow does. The tricks of the circus, the type casting of the harlequin and the shape shifting of the shadow all distract us from history, masking its details. Each in their different ways coerce our attention, stop us thinking about where they have come from and where they might be going.

Remixing it: The Past in Pieces

Fashion is often shamelessly irreverent in it uses of the past. Styling into the present often means literally combining the old and the new, the formal and the inappropriate, the trivial and the elegant. To make a collage look like a composition, to fit the disparate pieces together the past has to be taken apart. Old themes are worn as new details. Eccentric outfits are created by exhibiting the contemporary garments with the historical garments as though they were a set of cards, though the set is infinite.

A New Distress

The worn out, the scrapped, the torn apart, or burned and stained; are the material for the new distress. Distress here meaning both the sign of trauma and the evidence of wear and tear. In repeating these bits and pieces a disturbing past is being referred to; something ruined is being recovered. We have a second look at the material of the past, what we are looking for is obscure, but for some reason the fragments are alluring. We find a use for the things we had discarded and are intrigued by what is beautiful about them.

Coda: Garden of the Forking Paths

"I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars.....I saw it- the garden of the forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'several futures (not all)' suggested to me the image of a fork in time, rather than in space...In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses - simultaneously - all of them.....The Garden of the Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities..."
J-L Borges, The Garden of the Forking Paths; Ficciones

Genealogies are always infinite. Each section is just one possible route a way through to a different future. But links can be always arbitrary, random or intended. Different connections are always available.