Abstract

: The paper explores the concept of ‘trace’ and its relevance in contemporary fashion from a theoretical and curatorial perspective. Starting from the reflection on the ‘trace’, outlined by Jacques Derrida, the present contribution analyses the crucial role that such a concept plays today, in the work of designers, fashion theorists and curators. Individuating the ‘traces’ that a garment bears, listening to the narratives embedded in it, discloses in fact the possibility of drawing a constellation of references, both conceptual and historical. As masterfully exemplified by the reconstructive and deconstructive practices pursued, among the others, by Hussein Chalayan, Maison Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Cary-Williams, there is no objective standpoint, outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated or reinterpreted. Engaged in a design as well in a semantic challenge, the pieces of these designers stem from the consciousness that any creation as well as any critical fashion is always already a situated practice. At the same time, ‘curating’, today more than ever, means listening, interpreting and plotting. As emblematically stated by Hussein Chalayan during a lecture given in 2002 : “The garment is a ghost of all the multiple lives it may have had. Nothing is shiny and new; everything has a history […] The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer into a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archeological dig”