Revisiting Fashion at the Edge: An interview with Caroline Evans

In Fashion at the Edge , Caroline Evans places the past and present in conversation to investigate 1990s fashion’s obsession with the spectacular, the apocalyptic and the melancholic. Drawing on Ulrich Lehmann and Barbara Burman Baines’s writing on fashion revivals, she reads the citation of historical imagery by designers such as Alexander McQueen, Walter Van Beirendonck and Hussein Chalayan as ‘not so much a backwards as a forwards glance’: a contemporary projection of fears of the future and a collective response to the nihilism arising from the sensation of sitting at the end of history. Fitting, then, that on the event of Fashion at the Edge ’s reissue, we return to a work that has become something of a cult classic the world over. Twenty years after it was originally published, Caroline and I sat down to discuss the book in the context of a very different fashion landscape and question why fashion imagery is now less informed by themes of cruelty and deathliness, despite the ongoing persistence of collective anxiety and trauma.