Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness
By Caroline Evans
Yale University Press £19.99, 326 pages
From Alexander McQueen’s avant-garde catwalk creations to Hussein Chalayan’s deconstructed designs, fashion’s love affair with all things dark and macabre came into its own in the mid-1990s. In Fashion at the Edge British writer Caroline Evans examines the industry’s preoccupation with death, alienation and decay and argues that fashion “voices some of Western culture’s deepest concerns”.
Referencing the stylised violence of Quentin Tarantino films, the images in “The Clinic”, Sean Ellis’s 1997 fashion spread for The Face, pictured a dystopian fantasy that juxtaposed beauty and horror.
