Fashion Remains: Rethinking Ephemera in the Archive

Description

Fashion ephemera-from catalogues and invitations to press releases-have long been overlooked by the fashion industry and fashion academics. Fashion Remains redresses the balance, putting these objects centre stage and focusing on the wider creative practice of contemporary fashion designers, photographers, graphic designers, make-up artists, and many more. Fashion ephemera are considered not as disposable promotional devices, but as windows into hidden networks of collaboration and value creation in the fashion system. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Fashion Remains explores the unseen and privately circulated fashion ephemera produced by today's most prominent international fashion designers such as Margiela, Yamamoto, and Raf Simons. Showcasing a unique archive of materials, it focuses on Antwerp's avant-garde fashion scene and reveals the potential of these ephemeral objects to evoke and call into question material and immaterial knowledge about the fashion industry's actors, practices and ideologies.

Marco Pecorari is Assistant Professor and Program Director for the MA in Fashion Studies at Parsons Paris, The New School, France.

Fashion Remains carries out an unprecedented study, which analyzes material that has been overlooked by researchers in the field of fashion studies ... Marco Pecorari and his book contribute to the development of fashion studies, and it is a great reading recommendation for those researchers looking for new perspectives within their studies on material culture and fashion. The book enables the reader to realize the potential to explore other artefacts, places, and practices of the fashion system beyond clothing, fashion shows, and museums, such as fashion ephemera and the archive. * Journal of Dress History * [A]n excellent book. An engaging read by a researcher with a compelling and at times poetic authorial voice, and a worthy addition to any fashion library both personal and institutional. Pecorari invites us as fashion scholars to triangulate our research with an alternative data set, that we may generate yet more nuanced and compelling analyses of our subjects. Using his examination of ephemera through communication theoretical perspectives to advance a valuable new sub-discipline of fashion research. * Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture *