Time in Fashion : An Introductory Essay

Few phenomena embody the notion of time as well as fashion. Rooted in the ‘now’, it creates its own past through the process of rapid style change. Fastmoving, it is always on the verge of becoming something else. Uniquely poised between the past and the future, this essay explores fashion's affinity with unorthodox models of time. Historians, philosophers and social scientists have theorized different time regimes. In their account, time is a construct rather than a natural fact, despite our experience of it as something that just is. These various models give us ways to understand aspects of fashion that other approaches cannot describe. This is because fashion is more than an image or an object; it is also performative, which makes it a time-based and time-specific medium more than other kinds of design.