Fashion & change...my issue with the fashion timeline

I am an obsessive observer of change in fashion. This isn’t simply to remain well informed about the new silhouettes that are coming through for next season. Don’t get me wrong, I love a live-streamed runway presentation as much as the next fashion follower; but for me, observing change in fashion is not just about planning my future purchases - it provokes questions about the convergence of ideas, conversations and statements that have made this change occur.

Change in fashion comes about through an incremental series of related connections and interactions and its movements will create ripple effects through other areas of our lives. With this notion of change in mind, I would like to talk briefly about the fashion timeline. If you have an interest in fashion, chances are that you have seen a fashion timeline, like the one below. What better way to document the changes in fashion than through a simple device such as this? Timelines are included in most fashion textbooks, on fashion history websites and used regularly in museum displays on fashion and dress.

I have some issues with the fashion timeline…it is, indeed, a useful way of simplifying the complex and diverse changes that occur in fashion (for beginners), but its continued streamlining and paring down is dumbing fashion down! Finding one silhouette to represent fashionable dress for a 10 year stretch…really?? This does the creative expression of fashion a disservice, plus it perpetuates the idea that fashion evolves in a regular and unanimous manner (and we all know that’s not true). The Fashion Lexicon fashion history project strives to give change in fashion greater context; it situates fashion’s transformations in a web of information and references that explain the circumstances and shifting landscape of the changes…so those silhouettes of fashion don’t seem so abstract.