Fashion: from Attitudes to Poses

Abstract

Borrowing some of Aby Warburg’s methods from his Mnemosyne Atlas, this paper experiments with an anti-linear, non-teleological method of writing fashion history. It investigates fashion movement, gesture and pose, and their afterlife in images and objects. It thus looks at the intersection of time and the gesture, particularly in relation to the idea of the ‘now’, a central organising principle of fashion. To this end, it juxtaposes images of the body in motion from sources as varied as scientific photography, etiquette manuals and fashion magazines. Spanning three centuries, though not chronologically, the images show a range of activities: not only fashion posing, but also tennis-playing, duelling, dancing, military marching, social gestures, and going to the races. The paper proposes that each image is charged with some quality or attribute that is also immanent in one or more of the others, even though they have no causal or temporal relationship.