The Modernist Body: Mechanization, Motion and the Missing Part

With an introduction by Christopher Breward, Professor Evans presented 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 rationalisation of the body in the fields of work, leisure and mass culture, rather than of the avant garde. Yet the modernist body was also gendered and motile. Animated film strips of modernist sensibilities, early twentieth-century fashion models developed a unique language of the body. Their paradoxical modernity lay in their capacity to constitute themselves as objects through the eloquence of their mute performance. In a period when the social and economic emancipation of women were urgent and pressing questions, however, what kind of agency can be attributed to women whose performance was so fleeting, so ambiguous, and so minimal?

As the University continues to maintain and develop its profile as a global leader in arts research, a series of Professorial Platform lectures was launched in 2008.

The Platforms are an opportunity for University colleagues and associates, as well as invited members of the public, to learn more about the research undertaken in the University. The Platforms enable Professors to highlight their field of interest and the University, in turn, to recognise and commemorate their successes to date.

• https://youtu.be/k-fGWo0LAYY
• http://issuu.com/ualresearch/docs/caroli...