Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness

An academic treatise that's beautiful enough to be a coffee table book, Evans's study argues that during the 1990s avant garde fashion was""permeated by images of death, disease and dereliction."" Evans consciously focuses her work on one thread of the fashion world: the edgy costumes of designers like Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan and Viktor & Rolf. Theoretically, however, she recognizes no boundaries: her treatise incorporates the disparate works of Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Wilson, Simone de Beauvoir and many, many others. The result is a complex and provocative text, one that displays both the substantial intellect and practical curiosity of its author.