Thinking through fashion practically

In her landmark book Fashion at The Edge, Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, Caroline Evans gives weight to fashion design as a form of cultural analysis. In a recent interview with Rosie Findlay about the publication, Evans acknowledges that the book’s method registers as a “sort of mimicry” or “perhaps an echo?” of fashion design’s own operations. From my perspective, as a “theorist” surrounded by practitioners, and in a perpetual struggle against the incessant infantilization of the practice, her writing conveys more than an echo of fashion design. Despite it being theory-heavy, it goes some way in narrowing the gap between theory and practice as institutional categories, by theoretically “testing” the methods of “creative” fashion design. Put differently, it mobilizes fashion design methodologies, which it simultaneously helps to foreground, “assuming an equivalent between the historian and the designer.” As such, the book—and her work more broadly—offers fashion design a form of legitimacy as a mode of inquiry and highlights its specificities in ways that do not reiterate false oppositions between the material and immaterial elements of fashion. What follows, then, is a very brief attempt to point out the significance of Evans’s work not simply as fashion history but as a resource for the further formalization of practice-based research in fashion at a moment when its stakes and formats are being outlined. I have set out to do this in the wake of having almost concluded a two-year long practice-based project at HEAD–Genève (HES-SO). Here—to borrow from the Virgil Abloh playbook—I am “postrationalizing” Evans’s contribution from the standpoint of that project and elaborating on the project itself to highlight ways we might “stay with the practice” as we transform it.