A Shop of Images and Signs

The first section of the book,‘Critical Contexts’, examines some of the different institutions and ideologies that shape the meaning of the fashion image. For most fashion consumers, media images constitute their only point of contact with haute-couture garments.

Caroline Evans examines the way that such images function as both signs and commodities within the context of capital to mediate and structure desires and social relations. Focusing on the linked phenomena of the catwalk show and the magazine page, Evans draws upon Guy Debord’s notion of the ‘society of the spectacle’ to show how contemporary fashion circulates as both a situated practice and an image or idea.