essay
by OLIVIER ZAHM
“The temporality of fashion has another character that relates it to contemporaneity. Following the same gesture by which the present divides time according to a ‘no more’ and a ‘not yet,’ it also established a peculiar relationship with these ‘other times’ — certainly with the past, and perhaps also with the future.” Giorgio Agamben, What Is the Contemporary? 2008, Payot / Rivages
1. What is this unique relationship between fashion and time? If fashion divides the present into the new and the passé, how does it simultaneously engage in a “peculiar relationship” with both the past and the future? While remaining elusive in his response, Giorgio Agamben says something essential in his brilliant book What Is the Contemporary?: fashion, much like art, represents a prime example of this unique experience of time that is contemporaneity. Therefore, the connection between fashion and art is not…