The discursive space of the fashion show

The intersection between dress, body and space produces meanings that can be traced prior to the early Renaissance and have been rewritten since, according to different cultural, social, economic and design contexts. The fashion show has commanded different staging practices in different spaces, represented through diverse media across five hundred years of fashion history. Reading the construction of the fashion show and the meanings that it has generated requires an exploration of the way in which its many manifestations have represented commercial, cultural and social tensions in history. This cumulative reading provides a framework in which the fashion show can be seen as a discursive space which reframes it as a bundle of knowledge that is not homogenous but is made up by intersections, departures and discontinuities within the knowledge itself. Thus, a discourse is also a site for power struggle. The fashion show is a microcosm where rules, and their disruptions, bodies, constructed forms, objects, clothing, practices, time and space come together to create a narrative. The accumulation of these narratives across history, including their appraisal, critiques, imagery and documentation, also correlates with many other disciplines, those of scenography, production design, architecture, interior architecture, the diverse arts, film and cinema, and more expansively urbanism and landscape architecture. As Geczy and Karaminas write (2019: 7), the fashion object is communicated ‘across a network of representations and narrative connotations’, and not in isolation.