Purple Magazine
— The Essence of Fashion Issue #41 S/S 2024

time machine

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 superficial, nor a mere…

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