All I know is that the hours are long, under these […] proceedings which – how shall I say – which may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit. You may say it is to prevent our reason from foundering.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot

CATWALK SHOWS HARDLY EVER begin on time. Delay, anticipation and deferment are traditionally part of the routine. Waiting for the show to begin is, in other words, an integral part of the experience of the catwalk show as a live event. But time is precious and waiting not only exemplifies anticipation, but also holds an explicit value in itself. The time spent waiting for a catwalk show to start can be described as liminal, a moment that implies transition or passing from one state to another. In the age of information technology and instant image production, waiting – as both process and ritual – is, however, a rare occurrence. The philosopher Harold Schweizer argues that waiting can be regarded as a ‘temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life’.¹ While delayed catwalk shows during the otherwise hurried catwalk season are often considered unprofessional if not rude, waiting can also be seen as a privilege reserved for the small elite attending such events. In this context, the idea of liminal time marks an important aspect of the fashion cycle. As a threshold it implies the experience of a shift from one phase to another.

When exploring the role of liminal time in the context of contemporary fashion shows, its absence within the digital frame is noteworthy. Limitless reproductions of catwalk shows have in recent times altered the experience of the live event, which is arguably no longer rooted within liminal space and time. Recently, the purpose and currency of the live event and ideas of temporality have gained renewed attention in fashion writing. Sociologist Agnès Rocamora’s detailed discussion of fashion and time in relation to new technologies and the proliferation of digital platforms is especially vital for exploring the constant acceleration within the symbolic production of fashion. Rocamora argues that with the instant ‘production of images, fashion has become more immediate’ and that the speed with which fashion discourse is produced challenges the hegemonic position of high fashion.² What is of relevance when we discuss fashion’s relationship with time is how cultural forms such as the catwalk show are tested through constant acceleration of live streams and instant messaging on fashion media platforms or social media. In this regard, Rocamora refers to Paul Virilio’s seminal essay ‘The Overexposed City’. Here the French cultural theorist speaks of ‘real time’ being replaced by virtual time which exposes ‘itself instantaneously’.³ Yet physical space still holds meaning in the light of liminal time. The moment leading up to a catwalk show is hardly ever replicated online and in this sense the virtual world has not replaced the ‘real’. Instead, the digital representation of the live event has lost its threshold, as the stream begins the instant the model enters the runway.

The actual waiting, suspension and delay are only experienced or endured by the elite that is present at the show. This marks what can be called ‘real time’. In order to measure duration in time, the philosopher Henry Bergson famously observed a lump of sugar dissolving in water. His aim was to prove that our notion of time relates to our own, subjective understanding. Time spent waiting is informed through our lived experience, such as feelings of impatience or frustration, and not by what he describes as ‘mathematical time’.⁴ But in a postmodern context, time as well as consciousness is mobile and notions of duration incomplete. Time flows at different speeds and the instance of delay becomes a manifestation of the structure of the catwalk show, the ritual of waiting contextualising not only the reality of the live event, but also the reversal of social structures.

According to the anthropologist Victor Turner liminal time can be seen as a passage or pathway that is culturally defined.⁵ Turner refers to ritual in relation to structural positions, which govern behavioural as well as institutional processes. His position differs from that of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who differentiates between the social and the ritual as two separate entities.⁶ Rather than making this distinction, Turner defines liminality as a time or space in which ‘normal modes of social action’ are scrutinised or challenged. The idea of liminal time as a transitional stage is also described as ‘neither here nor there’, or as Turner puts it: ‘betwixt’ – a stage between separation and reassimilation.⁷

In his biography Dior by Dior, designer Christian Dior describes the moment of waiting for the live event as filled with anticipation; a stage before those on and off the catwalk come together:

‘Half an hour before the show, two people are seated comfortably side by side on each step; but twenty minutes later, they disappeared beneath a sea of new arrivals. The staircase begins to look like an overloaded boat.’⁸

Agoera is a Japanese illustrator and artist.

Nathalie Khan is a researcher and visiting lecturer at Sotheby’s and NYU, and the course leader at Central Saint Martins’ Culture, Criticism and Curation.

1. H Schweizer, On Waiting, Routledge, London, 2008, p.2 ↩

2. A Rocamora, ‘New Fashion Times: Fashion and Digital Media’, in S Black (ed.), The Handbook of Fashion Studies, Bloomsbury, London, 2013, pp.61–77 ↩

3. P Virilio, ‘The Overexposed City’, in Lost Dimension, MIT Press, New York, 2012 ↩

4. H Bergson, Creative Evolution, Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1998 [1st ed.1911], pp.9–10 ↩

5. V Turner, ‘Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal’, in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine Transaction, New York, 1997 [1st ed.1969], pp.166–194 ↩

6. C Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Basic Books, London, 1974 ↩

7. V Turner, ‘Rites of Passage’, in The Forest of Symbols, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1967, pp.96–102 ↩

8. C Dior, Dior by Dior, Penguin, London, 1957, p.106 ↩

THE MANNEQUIN’S SIGNATURE POSE emerged somewhere between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the early twentieth century. Though the model’s walk appeared suddenly, her pose developed slowly throughout the decades, evolving from an upright and restrained pause to, by the 1920s, what became a relaxed gesture characterised by fluidity: her hips were forward, her shoulders back – her hands on her hips as she confronts the audience’s gaze. The early shows were trade events, kept out of the public eye. In these private functions, pragmatically, the poses served a very concrete purpose. Encountering the buyer, the frozen pose helped visualise the clothes, exhibiting its features and functions: she pauses and her athletic gesture demonstrates the elasticity of the jersey material.¹ Frozen in time for even a split second, the gesture marked a break in the fluid walk of the mannequin, permitting her to be captured and crystallised within a still image, either by illustration or photograph, but most importantly as a fashion plate for the buyer’s gaze in an otherwise ephemeral environment.

But there was more to the mannequin’s pose beyond mere pragmatics. Fashion scholar Caroline Evans asserts that the mannequin’s pose was essentially a modernist phenomenon² , arising alongside the modernist problem of representation – one that coincided with the rise of cinema.³ In an abstract sense, in Evans’ view, the pose imbued the garment, an essentially static object, with the motions of its wearer, thereby facilitating a dialectic between motion and stasis. By pausing to pose, the model allowed the garment to be captured as a fashion plate; but by gesturing the pose, the fashion plate came to reflect the entire flow of the mannequin’s walk, capturing her like a definitive singular frame in the moving image of film.

If the fashion show and pose are essentially historic, tied to the modernist movement of the twentieth century, then maybe the erasure of the fashion poses from the runway in our own time reflects the cultural trends of the twenty-first century. Today’s catwalk models no longer pose. And what use is the mannequin’s pose in this age of livestreaming and Instagram, when the preservative nature of modern media has expunged the transient nature of the event altogether? Weaving up and down the runway, models today become wholly defined by their motion. The rise of digital has undone both the concrete and abstract necessity of the gesture altogether. And this motion—on the catwalk and of the constant circulation of its images—feeds the fashion cycle, itself increasingly dependent on speed.

According to film scholar Stella Bruzzi, the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli once said that ‘what Hollywood did today, fashion would do tomorrow.’⁴ While she may have been referring to the realm of aesthetics, there is another way in which this adage rings true. In October of 2009 during Paris Fashion Week, Alexander McQueen staged his final catwalk presentation, sending models down the runway adorned in a digital alien print. With hairstyles approximating fins and sleeves pleated to resemble gills, McQueen’s amphibious mannequins paraded down the stage in a puzzling route, wearing pincer-like heels that distorted the flow of their walk. In partnership with Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio,⁵ a pair of gargantuan and predatory motion-controlled cameras affixed to rails spun up and down alongside the models, capturing their every move. Inspired by a catastrophic flood that engulfs the world, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ invites us into a post-apocalyptic land of fantasy. The ‘us’ here is literal; for the first time ever, the Internet opened up access to the prestigious event to anyone with a broadband connection powerful enough to stream it.

In more ways than one, stasis is wholly excised from ‘Plato’s Atlantis.’ The swivelling cameras render the gesture of posing pragmatically redundant. The advanced tracking cameras subvert the audience’s gaze: there is no longer a single position of visibility and nothing needs to be visualised; the model no longer has to pause to demonstrate the elasticity of her dress: the cameras apprehend the contraction of every muscle, and with each contraction, the motion of the garment as well. With the advent of video-capturing technology, no time-slice of the model’s motion can escape us.

Though stasis survives, it appears to have been relegated to a lesser tier, condemned as something to be abandoned when possible. This subservience of the static to the moving is best exemplified by the implicit contempt that today’s designers – particularly younger ones – have towards traditional presentations, a format of demonstration where the garments are posed and shot much like how Evans describe a century ago. Initiatives like Fashion East in London champion emerging designers by offering them a chance to stage a fully produced runway show, allowing them to bypass the presentation format altogether. And for those who are relegated to presentations, many are choosing to incorporate the catwalk in them. This past London Fashion Week Men’s, Chalayan’s menswear ‘presentation’ was but an intimate catwalk show for various groups of press and buyers, looped in intervals through the afternoon like a video found on one’s social media feed. Emerging British designer Samuel Ross, meanwhile, made his fashion week debut for his label A-Cold-Wall this men’s week with an impromptu catwalk show incorporated into the presentation.⁶ 

The modernist paradox was this: how ought we represent the entirety of the model’s motions in a singular still image? Perhaps we can’t. But a characteristic of fashion in our time is that maybe we don’t have to. Not only do livestreaming and advanced camerawork allow us to extend the fashion plate in time through video, the fashion show has, in the last century and a half, evolved to become a public spectacle, particularly in the last few years through the rise of Instagram. This democratisation of fashion as image consumption comes at the price of the omnipresent nature of the singular fashion plate. Alongside the ubiquitous ‘Vogue Runway’ images are a slew of fragmented audience-produced runway images from all different angles, by the distinct individuals. Clicking on the geotag of the venue on Instagram after a show to reveals the same model and garments from a variety of angles. We as the audience are image-consumers, but we’ve also become image-producers.

But even this democracy of fashion remains a superficial one. Indeed, social media instils upon all of us a power to create; yet not all images are created equal. Power seems to be transferred from one institution to another, in an act of vertical dissemination and not horizontal. Editors give way to bloggers, while designers bend at the will of retailers. Rarely, if ever, is power assumed by the masses.

By now, any complaints of the pace of the fashion cycle probably seem a little platitudinous. Still, it’s worth taking a macroscopic view of the issue with the above in mind. Whereas the great private trade shows of the early twentieth century coincided with the paradoxical task of presenting motion through the motionless, the erasure of the static in our livestreamed public spectacles coincides with their own problem worth addressing. While our twentieth century counterparts confronted their own paradox, today, we’ve become concerned with ours: the conundrum of satisfying fashion’s consumers when, in Sisyphean fashion, that very fulfilment meant the introduction of a newer desire. From our twenty-first century perspective, immediacy has become the status quo. A several-month-long lag between image consumption and object consumption seems to be, by common standards, a broken affair: to instil upon the consumer a desire that will remain impossible to satisfy until the next season seems to be, as the argument goes, a counterintuitive way of conducting business.

In September 2016, when Burberry finally debuted its ‘see now, buy now’ collection at Makers House during London Fashion Week, in the eyes of many, the event marked the commencement of some strange new era. In a sense, those critics were perhaps right. For Burberry, the conventional cycle was no more. Its supply chain has fallen in tandem with the design process, yielding a congruity qua compression.⁷ With the traditional collection namesakes ‘Autumn/Winter’ and ‘Spring/Summer’ replaced by the unassuming and seasonless ‘September’ and ‘February’, for the first time in the brand’s history, the consumer’s delayed gratification of the past can now be displaced by the immediate indulgence of today.

To conflate cause and effect would be naïve. The removal of the fashion pose is not responsible for the acceleration of the fashion cycle; rather, it’s indicative of a greater conundrum. The same tools that have obliterated our previous problem carry their own. The modern fashion show, devoid of stasis and superficially democratised raises a question of sustainability. But as Nick Knight’s Tom Ford’s Spring/Summer 16 presentation⁸ – a wholly digital experience meant to be consumed in lieu of the show – suggests, if the fashion show as we know it is essentially a modernist phenomenon that embodies a dialectic between stasis and motion, one can’t help but question its purpose in our time when the static has become a rare occurrence altogether.  

To deliberate slowness has become an act of protest. For Spring/Summer 15, to conclude the typical movement of the runway show, Dries Van Noten sent his group of models to the floor. The models planted themselves onto the ground, as the floral prints of their garments became rooted into the green grass. Reduced to flora, the models fell into stasis in opposition to the preceding event. But while Van Noten punctuates his show with stillness, one can’t help but feel an artificial unnaturalness that seeps through the whole thing. As the ultra-slow motion of the accompanying short film suggests, the slowness of the show is a statement in and of itself.⁹ 

Edwin Jiang is a writer in London.

1. C Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America 1900-1929, New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. p 239 ↩

2. “[The mannequin’s] gestures and walk marked the time of modernity like a metronome: the fashion show staged not only modernist bodies but also modernist time, in which the flow of motion was punctuated by the pose.” ibid. p. 238 ↩

3. “All were concerned with the paradox of how to represent motion in still images at a time when film enabled, or was about to enable, the representation of moving images of the body; the pose is thus related to a ‘problem of representation being investigated in a number of parallel fields, which can be characterised as a ‘modernist enquiry” ibid. ↩

4. G Riello and P McNeil, The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010. p. 504 ↩

5. http://showstudio.com/project/platos_atlantis ↩

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YRpzjUOAEk ↩

7. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/how-burberry-is-operationalising-see-now-buy-now ↩

8. http://showstudio.com/project/tom_ford_s_s_16 ↩

9. http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/24967/1/relive-the-show-that-brought-fashion-week-to-a-standstill ↩