Chorus line from Massenet’s opera Panurge first performed at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, Paris, on 25 April 1913. Femina, 1 June 1914 Collection of Musée de la mode de la ville de Paris. Photograph Richard H Smith

‘The Modernist Body: Mechanization, Motion and the Missing Part’ introduced by Professor Christopher Breward, Principal, Edinburgh College of Art

Caroline Evans will talk about her research on modernism and the first fashion shows in France and America from 1900-1929. Walter Benjamin described the advent of ‘new velocities’ that gave modern life an altered rhythm, and from 1900 the desire to see women’s fashion in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic as models tangoed, slithered, swaggered and undulated across couture house and department store stages. Evans connects the first fashion shows to Taylorism, the chorus line and Fordist aesthetics, arguing that their modernism was that of the rationalization of the body in the fields of work, leisure and mass culture, rather than of the avant garde.

Caroline Evans’s forthcoming book The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America is due from Yale University Press in autumn 2012.

Tuesday 6th March 2012, 6.30pm

KX Platform Theatre
Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design
Granary Square, London N1C 4AA

To book tickets visit www.csm.arts.ac.uk/platform-theatre/whats-on or email cfp.events@csm.arts.ac.uk