Spectres: When Vogue Turns Back' fashion set up

FebruaryC8 24 May 2005
The wordspectacle 'designates a sight or show, the specter a ghost or vision. Etymologically they have the same root, both coming from the wordspecere 'to see' (Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: 50)
Spectres set out to reveal the shadows and experiences that formed amanner memory 'in contemporary dress. In showing the hidden, yet haunting, connections between recent vogue and its past, it used pieces drawn from avant-garde designers, from the VA and trend collection from the archive at Fashion Museum in Antwerp.Set up as a series of seven fairground attractions, Spectres invited the visitors into a labyrinth of associations: a shadow lantern throws silhouettes, enlarged maquettes look like games for grown-ups, rotating cogs make and break patterns.When creating this experimental show, curator Judith Clark invited manner trend illustrator Ruben Toledo to Provide the drawings, avant-garde jeweler Naomi Filmer to create mannequin prosthetics and manner theorist Caroline Evans to lend quotations that evoke the complexity of dress today.pearances: getting things backas the labyrinth doubles back on itself what is most modern is revealed as also having a relation to what is most old. Thus distant points in time can become proximate at specific moments as their paths run close to each other. ' (Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: 9)This first section looks at patterns in historical dress pattern, where motifs return and folds back on itself time to form a labyrinthine. To experience the haunting of contemporary vogue by its past, the viewer looks through optical devices that pick out details of the dress. Distorted elements are brought into the present, context is discarded.Seven views are set up: magnifying, reflecting, selecting, doubling the objects through the peepholes. They remind us of looking games, with each suggesting different ways a game designer might edit the past to create new designs.Nostalgia
We claim that the nostalgic one, in his attachment to the past, searches for his lost childhood from where he is henceforth exiled.

 Yes, no question. But I think that his homesickness has another source. It's not that he idealizes the past, it is not 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, for an unchanging eternity less than for always fresh beginnings. Thus time passes and destroys that tries to take away the ideal figure of a place that remains. The homeland is one of the metaphors of life. ' (J.B. Pontalis, Fentres: 100)
Here are fleeting moments in fashion idealised into monuments. Giant wooden figures, taken from Ruben Toledo's drawing Avenue of The Silhouettes, loom above the visitor.The exhibition questions Whether nostalgia is hoping for a forgotten past, or longing for impossible futures. Are the silhouettes of those historical dresses, or for future designs of dresses? Giant iron locks and keys routes promise behind these doors into other ideas.Ruben Toledo, pattern for a wooden silhouette Ruben Toledo, pattern for a wooden silhouette 2004Ruben Toledo, pattern for a wooden silhouette Ruben Toledo, pattern, silhouette for a wooden, 2004Ruben Toledo, pattern for a wooden silhouette Ruben Toledo, pattern, silhouette for a wooden, 2004Ruben Toledo 'Take a peek at this crinoline'Ruben Toledo,' Take a peek at this crinoline '2004Ruben Toledo, pattern for a wooden silhouette Ruben Toledo, pattern for a wooden silhouette 2004Details of the' Avenue of Silhouettes'. Photography by Ronald StoopsDetails of the 'Avenue of Silhouettes'. Photography by Ronald StoopsRuben Toledo, 'Avenue of Silhouettes'Ruben Toledo,' Avenue of Silhouettes', 2003Locking in and outt was not that the past simply illuminated the present, or that the present illuminated the past, rather the two images came together in the constellation acritical 'tracing a previously concealed connection.' (Caroline Evans, Vogue at the Edge: 33)
The past is brought into the foreground through quotation of its motifs, silhouettes, decoration. Where past and present pieces meet or interlock, there is an uncanny recognition. When they DiVERGE, they again are remote.Six themes are acted out on three huge cogs, moving incessantly like the fashion system itself. Style is promiscuous in its references, never resting on one idea. It can not afford to get stuck or be predictable. The question is, how does unlocking manner keep itself?The section's nods to Anna Piaggi Doppie Pagine (double page spread), each # in which she names for Italian Vogue month trends. She finds the clues that link disparate dresses on the catwalk. Here they are: Victoriana, tartan, Bohemia, designs for dresses, flags, and Futuristic.A new distress, A present haunted by the image of ruin in the future '(Caroline Evans Style at the Edge: 56)
The worn out, the torn apart, burned or stained and are the material for the new distress - distress here meaning both the signs of trauma and the evidence of wear and tear. In re-creating these effects, a disturbing past is referred by to. Something is being ruined recovered. We find a use for the things we had discarded and are intrigued by what is beautiful about them. Contemporary dress takes its inspiration from aging of the fabric itself, a different kind of history.An un-conserved wedding dress is laid out like a giant Doll on a hospital operating table. Naomi Filmer broken limbs turns into precious objects of desire.Remixing it: the past in pieces
And in the same way that musical history lost its linearity when mixed by the DJso too did its loose style and cultural history linearity whenremixed 'by late twentieth-century designers folding back on another one historical reference. Rather than recreating one period, [the] historical borrowings were multi-layeredrummaging through the historical wardrobe to produce clothes with a strictly modern resonance. ' (Caroline Evans, trend at the Edge: 25)Can be shamelessly irreverent trend is in its use of the past. Contemporary styling combines the old and often the new, the formal and the inappropriate, the trivial and the elegant. Old themes are worn as new details. Ruben Toledo's painted sections allude to a children's game of parts, as though the visitor were free to change the combinations. Many of the pieces in the display were found in Portobello Road, London's famous second-hand market used by stylists.Phantasmagoria: the amazing lost and found
The termphantasmagoria 'was first used in 1802 to describe another form of popular spectacle a magic lantern show # in which skeletons, ghosts and other fantastical figures were made to Rapidly increase and decrease in size metaphorically it came to connote some form of dramatic deception or visual display, # in which shadowy and unreal figures appear '(Caroline Evans, men at the Edge: 89)
The circus fairground and magic are the basis for this set up - a disused merry-go-round, a puppet theater and a revolving shadow show. The tricks of the circus, the typecasting of the harlequin and the shape-shifting shadow of the all distract us from history, masking its details.
'Curiouser and curiouser'
Curiouser and curiouser! ' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! ' (Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: chapter 2)Age is here associated with scale. The child's and woman's dress are like scaled-up dolls' clothes, speaking of the anxiety of aging. A giant curiosity cabinet houses a collection of historic games. Childhood is a motif throughout the exhibition for the past, our own past. This section also refers to the past of the museum itself - a curiosity cabinet.The collaboratorsCollaboration has always been essential part of style of curation for Judith Clark and this is apparent for the exhibition Spectres Particularly where the enormous influence of manner theorist Caroline Evans, fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo and jeweler Naomi Fulmer are in evidence.Judith Clark trained in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture and at the Architectural Association, London. Her shift towards vogue curation she began as the Parallels between Realised the design of spaces and dressing with that of dressing the human Form.Caroline Evans is Reader in History and Theory at Vogue Central Saint Martins, London. She teaches and writes on 20th century and current trends.Ruben Toledo Ruben Toledo paints, sculpts, draws and Illustrates. His work has been exhibited in museums seeking as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Textile Museum at the Louvre and the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.Naomi Filmer holds a Senior Research Fellowship at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, she has taught in the jewelery and fashion departments of Central Saint Martin's, The Royal College of Art and elsewhere.Written to accompany the exhibition Spectres: When Trend Turns Back, on display at the South Kensington VA between 24 February and 8 May well 2005th