Abstract
A ‘spectral turn’ in contemporary culture and society has created a
‘hauntological’ fashion culture of repeating styles, trends, looks and
appearances which, at an ever- increasing rate, forms a radical atemporal
culture of dress and clothing whereby all styles exist together at one time.
There appears to be no new futures only recurring pasts with repeating
themes that are never exactly the same. Taking his starting point from Marx,
Derrida established a ‘spectral turn’ in contemporary society and culture as
a ‘hauntology’ with Deleuze and Guattari theorising this static atemporality
as a repetitive sonority with the world of things (Bennett 2001, Coverley
2020). This spectral perpetual reinvention of fashion can be evidenced within
a now jaded and worn out ‘fashion system’ at its endgame, once a societal
trickle down then becoming a trickle up from the street ending in a
pluralist ‘everything and nothing’ in an advanced post- modern culture. This
chapter establishes the existence of the spectral turn within fashion cultures.
Following this it charts a correlation of speculative design with the imagined
fictions of 1960s science fiction writers, the futurist prophets of the space age
and how fashion embraced technological evolutions that started to express
in materials the conceptual futures of cultural fictions. Through a discourse
of writers within contemporary materialist and post- human thinking, this
chapter problematises approaches towards speculative design fabulations
that unify the relationship between humans, non- humans, objects, things and
fictions to re- evaluate styles, looks and appearance as an enchanted space
of ‘becomings’ where speculative fabulations create authentic and valuable
metanarratives through multiple storytellings.
‘hauntological’ fashion culture of repeating styles, trends, looks and
appearances which, at an ever- increasing rate, forms a radical atemporal
culture of dress and clothing whereby all styles exist together at one time.
There appears to be no new futures only recurring pasts with repeating
themes that are never exactly the same. Taking his starting point from Marx,
Derrida established a ‘spectral turn’ in contemporary society and culture as
a ‘hauntology’ with Deleuze and Guattari theorising this static atemporality
as a repetitive sonority with the world of things (Bennett 2001, Coverley
2020). This spectral perpetual reinvention of fashion can be evidenced within
a now jaded and worn out ‘fashion system’ at its endgame, once a societal
trickle down then becoming a trickle up from the street ending in a
pluralist ‘everything and nothing’ in an advanced post- modern culture. This
chapter establishes the existence of the spectral turn within fashion cultures.
Following this it charts a correlation of speculative design with the imagined
fictions of 1960s science fiction writers, the futurist prophets of the space age
and how fashion embraced technological evolutions that started to express
in materials the conceptual futures of cultural fictions. Through a discourse
of writers within contemporary materialist and post- human thinking, this
chapter problematises approaches towards speculative design fabulations
that unify the relationship between humans, non- humans, objects, things and
fictions to re- evaluate styles, looks and appearance as an enchanted space
of ‘becomings’ where speculative fabulations create authentic and valuable
metanarratives through multiple storytellings.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Technology, Sustainability and the Fashion Industry: Can Fashion Save the World? (Responsible Fashion) |
| Editors | Anneke Schramme , Nathalie Verboven |
| Publisher | Rouledge |
| Chapter | 12 |
| Pages | 198-208 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Edition | 1st |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781032641362 |
| Publication status | Published - 15 May 2024 |