Introduction: Touch, Click, and Motion: Archaeologies of Fashion Film After Digital Culture

This 6000-word article is the introduction to a themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture entitled ‘Archaeologies of Fashion Film’. It derives from a symposium that was part of the two-year AHRC-funded project Archaeology of Fashion Film (2017-2019) at the University of the Arts London and the University of Southampton. The project’s four researchers were Caroline Evans (principal investigator), Marketa Uhlirova and Jussi Parikka (co-investigators) and Lucy Moyse Ferreira (post doctoral researcher). Each has an article in this issue of the journal. The introduction, co-written by Evans and Parikka, describes the project’s aim to look at fashion film through the prism of fashion history, media archaeology and new film history. It draws in particular on ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging from Thomas Elsaesser’s work that links different time periods from early cinema to recent digital platforms. It introduces fashion film as a genre and as a historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression. It shows how the contributions in this journal issue address historical conditions of emergence, marginal voices in the historical record, and unexcavated archival materials. And it argues that they all contain feedback loops or recursive traits that resonate in contemporary practice.

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