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In Voices Startseite

Nonlinear and counterintuitive: the timeline of fashion(s)

aliena guggenberger

Fig 1: A springlike interpretation of autumn/winter 2026 at Dior / Dior © Giovanni Giannoni/WWD, Dior Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection [PHOTO]

As temperatures rise, social life shifts toward the promise of summer. Yet, from spring onwards, autumn/winter collections with coats and knitwear are already on display in department stores and online shops. During Paris Fashion Week (autumn/winter 2026) at the beginning of March, Jonathan Anderson showcased a surprisingly summery vision of winter fashion with flowers on short dresses for Dior, presented en plein air in the Tuileries Garden. What feels like a seasonal mismatch is in fact a symptom of changing temporalities in the fashion industry and its counterintuitive logic. The traditional two-season model has expanded into a near-continuous cycle of drops and micro-collections. Many department stores refresh core assortments every six to eight weeks, while fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M introduce new items weekly. At the extreme end of this spectrum, ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein update their inventories daily, adding hundreds to thousands of new items every single day.

Fig 2: Ultra-fast fashion brands drop thousands of new items daily / screenshot AG

Fashion, in this sense, no longer mirrors the present season; its mission is to anticipate the next, operating on a timeline increasingly disconnected from (climatic) reality and structuring consumer desire around a future that has not yet arrived. But how is that pace even possible?

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

The acceleration of the fashion system and the maintenance of a fully packed fashion calendar, with pre-collections and interim drops, are possible as business models only because they rely structurally on reuse. Here, ‘reuse’ does not refer to the eco-friendly repurposing of existing items, but to the continual reactivation of existing designs, silhouettes and aesthetic codes in newly produced clothes. In some cases, contemporary designers deliberately draw on historical references and the established house codes of brands like Balenciaga, Chanel or Dior, creating collections that both acknowledge the past and meet the audience’s expectation for continuity and recognisable brand identity. Building on growing consumer fascination with fashion archives as connecting tools between past and present, brands are starting to unlock their heritage to deepen the narratives behind the clothes. In February, Maison Margiela launched Folders, a project consisting of a publicly accessible cloud drive as an evolving archive that shares an exploration of both physical and digital materials from the house’s history, dating back to its founding in 1988.

Fig 3: In the exhibition ‘Fashion and Time’ (Metropolitan Museum), garments from different periods conversed across time / both: © Metropolitan Museum, Nicholas Alan Cope (Selected Images | The Metropolitan Museum of Art); (Left) Gabrielle Chanel Suit, spring/summer 1963 haute couture. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009, Gift of Jane Holzer, 1977 (2009.300.525a–c) / Karl Lagerfeld for House of Chanel, spring/summer 1994. Courtesy of CHANEL Patrimoine Collection, Paris // (Right) Mrs. Arnold, Dinner dress, ca. 1895, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Sally Ingalls, 1932 (2009.300.643a, b) / Comme des Garçons, ensemble, fall/winter 2004–5. Gift of Comme des Garçons, 2020.

Fashion does not merely produce novelty; it reorganises what already exists, which is clearly visible in the current resurgence of Y2K fashion, where key pieces of the early-2000s such as the crop top and low-rise jeans have re-entered contemporary wardrobes. As the example of the corset illustrates, even seemingly obsolete garments and styles are experiencing comebacks. Once dismissed as a relic of the Victorian era and nearly abandoned by the 1920s, the corset was revived in the 18th-century-inspired creations of Vivienne Westwood and more recently through the fascination with costume aesthetics fuelled by historical films and series. What was formerly underwear, once criticised for deforming the female body, has been transformed into outerwear embedded in red-carpet styles and everyday youth fashion, recoding its affective meaning from constraint to empowerment.

Fig. 4: Corset, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia (Costume Institute)

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Walter Benjamin had already observed in the 1930s, when Paris couturiers returned to the styles of la belle époque, that fashion proceeds nonlinearly: ‘The stream gradient of every fashion current… originates from what is forgotten (Jede Strömung der Mode … hat ihr Gefälle vom Vergessen her)’.[1] As Philipp Ekardt points out in his book Benjamin on Fashion, the most focused treatment of the subject can be found in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), where he draws partly on the theoretical reflections of the sociologist Georg Simmel and fashion critic Helen Grund (1886–1982).[2] Ekardt shows that, for Benjamin, fashion is not merely a symptom of modern capitalism but a cultural ‘chronotechnology’ that structures historical time by repeatedly reactivating elements of the past within the present. The concept of the tiger’s leap in Walter Benjamin’s thought originally served to describe a sudden, dialectical moment in history in which the past is violently seized and made present. In the context of fashion, this metaphor helps to understand the rearticulation of what has gone out of style. Extending the idea of the leap as an almost violent seizure of the past can be read not only in terms of time but also in relation to space and globalisation. Innovation in fashion often emerges through acts of appropriation that draw not just on earlier moments in history but on forms from other cultures, allowing something new to appear under the guise of what already exists.

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Looking at fashion history reveals recurring patterns that are often mistakenly seen as uniquely modern, such as the slow-fashion movement as a reaction to fast fashion. Over a hundred years ago, contemporaries were already criticising the rapid pace of the ready-to-wear industry and the perceived ‘haste’ of fashion change. In the years preceding the First World War, several designers and artists associated with the reform dress movement endeavoured to establish timelessness as a guiding principle in women’s fashion. This ideal found expression in loose, simple silhouettes and a deliberate reference to classical antiquity, as seen in designs of Hedwig Buschmann, Madeleine Vionnet and the Delphi Dress of Henriette and Mariano Fortuny. The aim was to create more practical garments that contrasted with the restrictive and expensive, ever-changing couture wardrobe.

Fig 5:(left) Hedwig Buschmann’s Neue Frauentracht, 1910; (right) Clarisse Coudert wearing a Delphi Dress, 1917 // AG / Public Domain Conde nast fortuny - Delphos gown - Wikipedia

The logics of fashion — the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake and the cyclical recurrence of stylistic forms — were seen as symptomatic of a fast-moving modernity then as now. However, the very perception of speed must be assessed differently in a pre-digital age. In this context, Georg Simmel argued in 1905 that the faster fashions change, the more it reflects the nervousness of the era: ‘Changes in fashion reveal how nerves can be dulled to stimuli. As an age becomes more nervous, the more quickly its fashions change’.[3] This inevitably raises the question: how nervous is our own era?

Changing catwalks

After the collapse of the European and North American financial markets in 1929, the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture reduced the size of its members’ collections from approximately 400 to 100 designs. This enforced rarefaction of haute couture consolidated what has since become a defining marketing paradigm: the production of extraordinarily costly, highly exclusive garments accessible only to a narrow elite. It thus stands in stark contrast to the fast-fashion industry above, whose logic is predicated on mass production, accelerated turnover and broad consumer accessibility. While the expansion in the fast-fashion product lines and compression of their product cycles has led to a much broader range of items to be presented, the fashion shows themselves are growing ever shorter and more condensed, lasting barely 10 minutes. It is not the mass of garments, but the pace of the industry that has been transferred to the shows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this accelerated rhythm was briefly interrupted: lockdowns and travel restrictions forced the industry into a moment of deceleration, as shows were postponed, cancelled or shifted to remote formats. Yet this disruption remained temporary and the fashion calendar soon returned to its familiar fast-paced rhythm after the pandemic.
‘The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer in a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archaeological dig’. Hussein Chalayan in the show notes to Medea (Spring/Summer 2002)
One of the designers that invoked time most intensively in his early collections is Hussein Chalayan, framing them in themes of memory and future archaeology (e.g. 1993: the tangent flows). In his show One Hundred and Eleven (2007), garments mechanically transform on the runway before the audience’s eyes, successively revealing silhouettes from different decades. The fluidity of time was represented by an enormous clock in the background which, like a time machine, functions as a double image in fashion, signifying both compulsory change and the fluid, relentless time of its own history.[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjnuHmxRbxI&t=642s The nonlinearity — or even anti-linearity — of fashion is also reflected in spatiality. The traditionally linear catwalk has increasingly been dissolved and deconstructed in 21st-century scenography. A striking example is OMA/AMO’s Cube Field set design for Prada Menswear (spring/summer 2012) at the Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas, where the audience was arranged in a grid, abolishing the primacy of the front row.

Conclusion: continuities

If fashion history appears fragmented, it is only because we tend to read it linearly. Seen through the lens of nonlinear temporality, the reappearance of silhouettes, materials and stylistic gestures is not an anomaly but an enduring principle. The exhibition Fashion and Time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) captured this dynamic by drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. Supported by a dynamic exhibition design by visual artist Es Devlin, who shaped the galleries into vast clock faces, each marking 60 ‘minutes’ of fashion, the exhibition stages a series of curatorial flashbacks that allow garments from different periods to converse across time (see the images above). The pace of fashion makes it virtually impossible to be keep up and be fashionable. But as Elena Esposito puts it, the constant turnover produces a paradoxical stability.[5] Precisely because trends are known to be short-lived, they function as reliable temporal markers. Fashion thus structures social time through cycles of anticipation, novelty and obsolescence, revealing how modern societies organise themselves around shifting yet patterned timelines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7B-xr346JU&t=18s   [1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [2] Philipp Ekart, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), AP 393, lines 496-97. [3]  Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode, ed. Hans Landsberg, Moderne Zeitfragen, (Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905), 11. Author’s translation. [4] Allessandra Vaccari, 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy', ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009). [5] Elena Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004).
bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ekart, Philipp. Benjamin on Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Esposito, Elena. Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie der Mode. Moderne Zeitfragen. Edited by Hans Landsberg. Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905. Vaccari, Allessandra. 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy'. ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009): 12-19. Continue Reading
29 April 2026
In Voices Blog

Nonlinear and counterintuitive: the timeline of fashion(s)

aliena guggenberger
[Editor's note: this is the first post in the blog series on temporalities that Susanne Quitmann introduced yesterday]

Fig 1: A springlike interpretation of autumn/winter 2026 at Dior / Dior © Giovanni Giannoni/WWD, Dior Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection [PHOTO]

  As temperatures rise, social life shifts toward the promise of summer. Yet, from spring onwards, autumn/winter collections with coats and knitwear are already on display in department stores and online shops. During Paris Fashion Week (autumn/winter 2026) at the beginning of March, Jonathan Anderson showcased a surprisingly summery vision of winter fashion with flowers on short dresses for Dior, presented en plein air in the Tuileries Garden.   What feels like a seasonal mismatch is in fact a symptom of changing temporalities in the fashion industry and its counterintuitive logic. The traditional two-season model has expanded into a near-continuous cycle of drops and micro-collections. Many department stores refresh core assortments every six to eight weeks, while fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M introduce new items weekly. At the extreme end of this spectrum, ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein update their inventories daily, adding hundreds to thousands of new items every single day.

Fig 2: Ultra-fast fashion brands drop thousands of new items daily / screenshot AG

Fashion, in this sense, no longer mirrors the present season; its mission is to anticipate the next, operating on a timeline increasingly disconnected from (climatic) reality and structuring consumer desire around a future that has not yet arrived. But how is that pace even possible?

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

The acceleration of the fashion system and the maintenance of a fully packed fashion calendar, with pre-collections and interim drops, are possible as business models only because they rely structurally on reuse. Here, ‘reuse’ does not refer to the eco-friendly repurposing of existing items, but to the continual reactivation of existing designs, silhouettes and aesthetic codes in newly produced clothes. In some cases, contemporary designers deliberately draw on historical references and the established house codes of brands like Balenciaga, Chanel or Dior, creating collections that both acknowledge the past and meet the audience’s expectation for continuity and recognisable brand identity. Building on growing consumer fascination with fashion archives as connecting tools between past and present, brands are starting to unlock their heritage to deepen the narratives behind the clothes. In February, Maison Margiela launched Folders, a project consisting of a publicly accessible cloud drive as an evolving archive that shares an exploration of both physical and digital materials from the house’s history, dating back to its founding in 1988.

Fig 3: In the exhibition ‘Fashion and Time’ (Metropolitan Museum), garments from different periods conversed across time / both: © Metropolitan Museum, Nicholas Alan Cope (Selected Images | The Metropolitan Museum of Art); (Left) Gabrielle Chanel Suit, spring/summer 1963 haute couture. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009, Gift of Jane Holzer, 1977 (2009.300.525a–c) / Karl Lagerfeld for House of Chanel, spring/summer 1994. Courtesy of CHANEL Patrimoine Collection, Paris // (Right) Mrs. Arnold, Dinner dress, ca. 1895, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Sally Ingalls, 1932 (2009.300.643a, b) / Comme des Garçons, ensemble, fall/winter 2004–5. Gift of Comme des Garçons, 2020.

Fashion does not merely produce novelty; it reorganises what already exists, which is clearly visible in the current resurgence of Y2K fashion, where key pieces of the early-2000s such as the crop top and low-rise jeans have re-entered contemporary wardrobes. As the example of the corset illustrates, even seemingly obsolete garments and styles are experiencing comebacks. Once dismissed as a relic of the Victorian era and nearly abandoned by the 1920s, the corset was revived in the 18th-century-inspired creations of Vivienne Westwood and more recently through the fascination with costume aesthetics fuelled by historical films and series. What was formerly underwear, once criticised for deforming the female body, has been transformed into outerwear embedded in red-carpet styles and everyday youth fashion, recoding its affective meaning from constraint to empowerment.

Fig. 4: Corset, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia (Costume Institute)

 

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Walter Benjamin had already observed in the 1930s, when Paris couturiers returned to the styles of la belle époque, that fashion proceeds nonlinearly: ‘The stream gradient of every fashion current… originates from what is forgotten (Jede Strömung der Mode … hat ihr Gefälle vom Vergessen her)’.[1] As Philipp Ekardt points out in his book Benjamin on Fashion, the most focused treatment of the subject can be found in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), where he draws partly on the theoretical reflections of the sociologist Georg Simmel and fashion critic Helen Grund (1886–1982).[2] Ekardt shows that, for Benjamin, fashion is not merely a symptom of modern capitalism but a cultural ‘chronotechnology’ that structures historical time by repeatedly reactivating elements of the past within the present. The concept of the tiger’s leap in Walter Benjamin’s thought originally served to describe a sudden, dialectical moment in history in which the past is violently seized and made present. In the context of fashion, this metaphor helps to understand the rearticulation of what has gone out of style. Extending the idea of the leap as an almost violent seizure of the past can be read not only in terms of time but also in relation to space and globalisation. Innovation in fashion often emerges through acts of appropriation that draw not just on earlier moments in history but on forms from other cultures, allowing something new to appear under the guise of what already exists.

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Looking at fashion history reveals recurring patterns that are often mistakenly seen as uniquely modern, such as the slow-fashion movement as a reaction to fast fashion. Over a hundred years ago, contemporaries were already criticising the rapid pace of the ready-to-wear industry and the perceived ‘haste’ of fashion change. In the years preceding the First World War, several designers and artists associated with the reform dress movement endeavoured to establish timelessness as a guiding principle in women’s fashion. This ideal found expression in loose, simple silhouettes and a deliberate reference to classical antiquity, as seen in designs of Hedwig Buschmann, Madeleine Vionnet and the Delphi Dress of Henriette and Mariano Fortuny. The aim was to create more practical garments that contrasted with the restrictive and expensive, ever-changing couture wardrobe.

Fig 5:(left) Hedwig Buschmann’s Neue Frauentracht, 1910; (right) Clarisse Coudert wearing a Delphi Dress, 1917 // AG / Public Domain Conde nast fortuny - Delphos gown - Wikipedia

The logics of fashion — the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake and the cyclical recurrence of stylistic forms — were seen as symptomatic of a fast-moving modernity then as now. However, the very perception of speed must be assessed differently in a pre-digital age. In this context, Georg Simmel argued in 1905 that the faster fashions change, the more it reflects the nervousness of the era: ‘Changes in fashion reveal how nerves can be dulled to stimuli. As an age becomes more nervous, the more quickly its fashions change’.[3] This inevitably raises the question: how nervous is our own era?

Changing catwalks

After the collapse of the European and North American financial markets in 1929, the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture reduced the size of its members’ collections from approximately 400 to 100 designs. This enforced rarefaction of haute couture consolidated what has since become a defining marketing paradigm: the production of extraordinarily costly, highly exclusive garments accessible only to a narrow elite. It thus stands in stark contrast to the fast-fashion industry above, whose logic is predicated on mass production, accelerated turnover and broad consumer accessibility. While the expansion in the fast-fashion product lines and compression of their product cycles has led to a much broader range of items to be presented, the fashion shows themselves are growing ever shorter and more condensed, lasting barely 10 minutes. It is not the mass of garments, but the pace of the industry that has been transferred to the shows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this accelerated rhythm was briefly interrupted: lockdowns and travel restrictions forced the industry into a moment of deceleration, as shows were postponed, cancelled or shifted to remote formats. Yet this disruption remained temporary and the fashion calendar soon returned to its familiar fast-paced rhythm after the pandemic.
‘The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer in a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archaeological dig’. Hussein Chalayan in the show notes to Medea (Spring/Summer 2002)
One of the designers that invoked time most intensively in his early collections is Hussein Chalayan, framing them in themes of memory and future archaeology (e.g. 1993: the tangent flows). In his show One Hundred and Eleven (2007), garments mechanically transform on the runway before the audience’s eyes, successively revealing silhouettes from different decades. The fluidity of time was represented by an enormous clock in the background which, like a time machine, functions as a double image in fashion, signifying both compulsory change and the fluid, relentless time of its own history.[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjnuHmxRbxI&t=642s The nonlinearity — or even anti-linearity — of fashion is also reflected in spatiality. The traditionally linear catwalk has increasingly been dissolved and deconstructed in 21st-century scenography. A striking example is OMA/AMO’s Cube Field set design for Prada Menswear (spring/summer 2012) at the Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas, where the audience was arranged in a grid, abolishing the primacy of the front row.

Conclusion: continuities

If fashion history appears fragmented, it is only because we tend to read it linearly. Seen through the lens of nonlinear temporality, the reappearance of silhouettes, materials and stylistic gestures is not an anomaly but an enduring principle. The exhibition Fashion and Time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) captured this dynamic by drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. Supported by a dynamic exhibition design by visual artist Es Devlin, who shaped the galleries into vast clock faces, each marking 60 ‘minutes’ of fashion, the exhibition stages a series of curatorial flashbacks that allow garments from different periods to converse across time (see the images above). The pace of fashion makes it virtually impossible to be keep up and be fashionable. But as Elena Esposito puts it, the constant turnover produces a paradoxical stability.[5] Precisely because trends are known to be short-lived, they function as reliable temporal markers. Fashion thus structures social time through cycles of anticipation, novelty and obsolescence, revealing how modern societies organise themselves around shifting yet patterned timelines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7B-xr346JU&t=18s   [1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [2] Philipp Ekart, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), AP 393, lines 496-97. [3]  Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode, ed. Hans Landsberg, Moderne Zeitfragen, (Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905), 11. Author’s translation. [4] Allessandra Vaccari, 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy', ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009). [5] Elena Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004).
bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ekart, Philipp. Benjamin on Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Esposito, Elena. Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie der Mode. Moderne Zeitfragen. Edited by Hans Landsberg. Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905. Vaccari, Allessandra. 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy'. ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009): 12-19. Continue Reading
28 April 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Startseite

gd:c voices part II: virtuous epistemic circles

How does your research shape the focus, and how is it shaped by the focus?

SQ: Temporality is not just an aspect of my research; it is the central object of my inquiry. In my current postdoctoral project I use trees to examine how modern societies have understood, measured and imagined time and history. Trees preserve material traces of past climates and human interventions, and they often outlive the people who study, manage and exploit them. Because they embody multiple temporal scales – biological, environmental and historical – trees reveal much about modern ideas of temporality as a constitutive feature of modernity itself.

Tree rings reflect growth and age (Photo: Susanne Quitmann)

My research focuses on the emergence of dendrochronology — the science of analysing tree-rings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, Germany and Sweden. Rather than writing a disciplinary history of dendrochronology as a scientific field, however, I examine how humans’ interactions with trees shaped thinking about natural, historical and social time. I am especially interested in how scientific practices, environmental knowledge and material encounters with trees cast new temporal frameworks and scales.

Wood samples at the Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Tring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona)

Engaging with temporalities as a research focus here at gd:c has provided a conceptual framework for approaching this history and linking it to larger questions of globalisation. Time was not a single, shared, homogenous framework; it was produced unevenly through processes of movement, exchange, circulation and rupture. Drawing on both my work on dendrochronology and my earlier research on British child migrants, and in dialogue with my colleagues at gd:c, I am developing the concept of temporal dis:connectivity as a shared analytical framework for the research focus. I hope that this concept will give researchers a shared way of thinking about temporalities along the lines of global dis:connectivity and a lasting, common language to talk about it. At the same time, our research focusses aren’t hermetically sealed. For example, I am interested in laboratories in the history of dendrochronology as sites where temporal knowledge was produced, stabilised and contested. I also welcome the opportunity to further develop the concept of temporal dis:connectivity in relation to cultural infrastructures, where time becomes a resource and where different temporal regimes intersect. AG: As an art and fashion historian, my work reveals how cultural production was structured and sustained through infrastructural frameworks and design strategies. The cultural infrastructure of the fashion system encompasses ateliers and factories for production; magazines, exhibitions, fairs and fashion shows for dissemination; and stores, markets and social media for consumption. In my current research, cultural infrastructure goes beyond spaces and events to include networks of designers and manufacturers. Particularly from the early 20th century, they were organised through various national and international associations, shaped by alliances, dependencies, connections and disconnections.  As Yuniya Kawamura has argued in Fashion-ology, designers are key figures in the production of fashion; they personify fashion, and their designs objectify fashion. I would add that the centralisation of fashion production and its associated politics become evident through the designers’ strategies, which include their own infrastructure: the concept, making and presentation of a collection at a specific venue. In addition to these artistic practices, design strategies also involve entrepreneurial ventures to establish their work globally through cultural infrastructure.

US Vogue, March 15, 1953, Photo: © Vogue Archive, Condé Nast (March 15 1953 | Vogue)

Since the early 2000s, designer councils and fashion shows outside the traditional fashion capitals (Paris, New York, London, Milan) have sought to decentralise the global fashion system and disrupt its hierarchical and Eurocentric structures. Fashion weeks in cities like Jakarta and Dakar provide alternative platforms for local designers and textile traditions.  I am examining the roots of these national fashion policies, which aimed to strengthen regional economies, enhance prestige for local and indigenous craftsmanship, and export cultural heritage worldwide. Which artistic, commercial and industrial infrastructures helped to promote national design in the 20th century? Which transnational parallels run through the strategies and motivations of different fashion institutes? How and why were these institutions and associations supported by the government? https://youtu.be/TC9gGBwISUw In the postwar period, I am especially interested in fashion (re)presentations at international events such as the Olympic Games and world's fairs. They played an important role in framing how cultures, including dress practices, are aestheticised and made legible to global audiences. Designers mobilized dresses as symbols of (national) identity to inspire their designs, without considering the risk of cultural appropriation when elements are extracted, commodified and detached from their original cultural context. I am focusing on these strategies of global visibility and export alongside the institutional promotion of national fashion through institutes, associations and individual designers.

A German fashion magazine promoting what they called 'Mexican' fashion, inspired by the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City (Photo: Aliena Guggenberger)

CF: My research has long focused on experimental spaces at the fault line between the planetary and the global. Working at the intersection of architectural and environmental history, I study how built environments and infrastructures — laboratories, observatories and simulation facilities — mediate planetary processes such as seismic wave propagation, atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, soil formation and the limits of life in extreme environments, rendering them globally legible. Whether examining geophysical observatories around 1900 (see my Planetary Disequilibrium), or, more recently, planetary analogues, I ask how these processes are translated into architectural form, experimental protocol, and infrastructures of knowledge, and what kinds of dis:connections emerge in that translation.

ESA-DLR LUNA - Moon analogue, Cologne, Germany. (above) Rehearsal - simulated moonwalk at the LUNA facilities as preparation for future lunar surface operations. Photo: © ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler. / (below) Virtual reality (VR) model of LUNA’s main hall containing the regolith test bed area with dust chamber visible. Image: © ESA/DLR-F. Saling.

This perspective also shapes my approach to the laboratories of dis:connectivity research focus here at gd:c. Rather than treating laboratories as bounded, local sites, I see them as mediating environments where abstract models of our planet assemble global relations. Laboratories extract signals, samples and processes from particular environments and render them comparable across distance and scale. In doing so, they connect the world through shared standards, models and datasets, while simultaneously disconnecting those abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them.

Concordia Station - planetary analogue, Dome C plateau in Antarctica. Operated jointly by the French Polar Institute IPEV and the Italian Antarctic Programme PNRA. Photo: © ESA/IPEV/PNRA-J. Lacrampe/N. Purvis.

These questions are at the centre of my current research project on planetary analogues. The project examines analogue environments — Antarctic research stations, lunar and Martian simulation facilities, underwater habitats and extreme desert sites — where Earth itself is reconfigured to stand in for other planets or future worlds. I approach these sites as laboratories of dis:connectivity: spaces that make planetary conditions actionable within global scientific, political, and technological regimes by selectively isolating variables, staging rehearsals and projecting futures, while unevenly displacing risk, labour and environmental exposure. 
NASA JETT test series, San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, May 2024. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team develops, integrates, and executes human-in-the-loop tests and analog missions. Drone footage of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Doublas. Video: jsc2025m000255 © NASA/JSC.
Thinking through the gd:c research focus has sharpened my view of these analogue sites. Approaching laboratories through dis:connectivity unearths the tension between the planetary and the global. The planetary refers to processes that exceed human scale and control, while the global names the infrastructures and institutions through which those processes are stabilised, managed and governed. Planetary analogues, understood as laboratories, sit precisely in between. They translate planetary uncertainty into global regimes of knowledge and governance, often producing new asymmetries while promising preparedness and resilience.

Digital plants laboratory showcasing global dis:connections. Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona, 2025, Information Plus Conference at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge. (Images courtesy of the artists.)

In this reciprocal way, my research shapes the research focus as a shared space of inquiry, always in dialogue with our fellows’ projects, each coming from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The research focus likewise continues to sharpen my understanding of laboratories as sites where the planetary and the global rarely align seamlessly, but instead meet through friction, negotiation and experimentation. This is what makes laboratories such fertile ground for research at gd:c. Continue Reading
25 February 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog

gd:c voices part II: virtuous epistemic circles

[Editor's note: this post continues the interview with our postdocs that we began last month.]  

How does your research shape the focus, and how is it shaped by the focus?

SQ: Temporality is not just an aspect of my research; it is the central object of my inquiry. In my current postdoctoral project I use trees to examine how modern societies have understood, measured and imagined time and history. Trees preserve material traces of past climates and human interventions, and they often outlive the people who study, manage and exploit them. Because they embody multiple temporal scales – biological, environmental and historical – trees reveal much about modern ideas of temporality as a constitutive feature of modernity itself.

Tree rings reflect growth and age (Photo: Susanne Quitmann)

My research focuses on the emergence of dendrochronology — the science of analysing tree-rings — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, Germany and Sweden. Rather than writing a disciplinary history of dendrochronology as a scientific field, however, I examine how humans’ interactions with trees shaped thinking about natural, historical and social time. I am especially interested in how scientific practices, environmental knowledge and material encounters with trees cast new temporal frameworks and scales.

Wood samples at the Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Tring Research (LTRR), University of Arizona—the birthplace of dendrochronology (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona)

Engaging with temporalities as a research focus here at gd:c has provided a conceptual framework for approaching this history and linking it to larger questions of globalisation. Time was not a single, shared, homogenous framework; it was produced unevenly through processes of movement, exchange, circulation and rupture. Drawing on both my work on dendrochronology and my earlier research on British child migrants, and in dialogue with my colleagues at gd:c, I am developing the concept of temporal dis:connectivity as a shared analytical framework for the research focus. I hope that this concept will give researchers a shared way of thinking about temporalities along the lines of global dis:connectivity and a lasting, common language to talk about it. At the same time, our research focusses aren’t hermetically sealed. For example, I am interested in laboratories in the history of dendrochronology as sites where temporal knowledge was produced, stabilised and contested. I also welcome the opportunity to further develop the concept of temporal dis:connectivity in relation to cultural infrastructures, where time becomes a resource and where different temporal regimes intersect. AG: As an art and fashion historian, my work reveals how cultural production was structured and sustained through infrastructural frameworks and design strategies. The cultural infrastructure of the fashion system encompasses ateliers and factories for production; magazines, exhibitions, fairs and fashion shows for dissemination; and stores, markets and social media for consumption. In my current research, cultural infrastructure goes beyond spaces and events to include networks of designers and manufacturers. Particularly from the early 20th century, they were organised through various national and international associations, shaped by alliances, dependencies, connections and disconnections.  As Yuniya Kawamura has argued in Fashion-ology, designers are key figures in the production of fashion; they personify fashion, and their designs objectify fashion. I would add that the centralisation of fashion production and its associated politics become evident through the designers’ strategies, which include their own infrastructure: the concept, making and presentation of a collection at a specific venue. In addition to these artistic practices, design strategies also involve entrepreneurial ventures to establish their work globally through cultural infrastructure.

US Vogue, March 15, 1953, Photo: © Vogue Archive, Condé Nast (March 15 1953 | Vogue)

Since the early 2000s, designer councils and fashion shows outside the traditional fashion capitals (Paris, New York, London, Milan) have sought to decentralise the global fashion system and disrupt its hierarchical and Eurocentric structures. Fashion weeks in cities like Jakarta and Dakar provide alternative platforms for local designers and textile traditions.  I am examining the roots of these national fashion policies, which aimed to strengthen regional economies, enhance prestige for local and indigenous craftsmanship, and export cultural heritage worldwide. Which artistic, commercial and industrial infrastructures helped to promote national design in the 20th century? Which transnational parallels run through the strategies and motivations of different fashion institutes? How and why were these institutions and associations supported by the government? https://youtu.be/TC9gGBwISUw In the postwar period, I am especially interested in fashion (re)presentations at international events such as the Olympic Games and world's fairs. They played an important role in framing how cultures, including dress practices, are aestheticised and made legible to global audiences. Designers mobilized dresses as symbols of (national) identity to inspire their designs, without considering the risk of cultural appropriation when elements are extracted, commodified and detached from their original cultural context. I am focusing on these strategies of global visibility and export alongside the institutional promotion of national fashion through institutes, associations and individual designers.

A German fashion magazine promoting what they called 'Mexican' fashion, inspired by the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City (Photo: Aliena Guggenberger)

CF: My research has long focused on experimental spaces at the fault line between the planetary and the global. Working at the intersection of architectural and environmental history, I study how built environments and infrastructures — laboratories, observatories and simulation facilities — mediate planetary processes such as seismic wave propagation, atmospheric circulation, oceanic currents, soil formation and the limits of life in extreme environments, rendering them globally legible. Whether examining geophysical observatories around 1900 (see my Planetary Disequilibrium), or, more recently, planetary analogues, I ask how these processes are translated into architectural form, experimental protocol, and infrastructures of knowledge, and what kinds of dis:connections emerge in that translation.

ESA-DLR LUNA - Moon analogue, Cologne, Germany. (above) Rehearsal - simulated moonwalk at the LUNA facilities as preparation for future lunar surface operations. Photo: © ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler. / (below) Virtual reality (VR) model of LUNA’s main hall containing the regolith test bed area with dust chamber visible. Image: © ESA/DLR-F. Saling.

  This perspective also shapes my approach to the laboratories of dis:connectivity research focus here at gd:c. Rather than treating laboratories as bounded, local sites, I see them as mediating environments where abstract models of our planet assemble global relations. Laboratories extract signals, samples and processes from particular environments and render them comparable across distance and scale. In doing so, they connect the world through shared standards, models and datasets, while simultaneously disconnecting those abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them.

Concordia Station - planetary analogue, Dome C plateau in Antarctica. Operated jointly by the French Polar Institute IPEV and the Italian Antarctic Programme PNRA. Photo: © ESA/IPEV/PNRA-J. Lacrampe/N. Purvis.

These questions are at the centre of my current research project on planetary analogues. The project examines analogue environments — Antarctic research stations, lunar and Martian simulation facilities, underwater habitats and extreme desert sites — where Earth itself is reconfigured to stand in for other planets or future worlds. I approach these sites as laboratories of dis:connectivity: spaces that make planetary conditions actionable within global scientific, political, and technological regimes by selectively isolating variables, staging rehearsals and projecting futures, while unevenly displacing risk, labour and environmental exposure. 
NASA JETT test series, San Francisco Volcanic Field near Flagstaff, Arizona, May 2024. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team develops, integrates, and executes human-in-the-loop tests and analog missions. Drone footage of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Doublas. Video: jsc2025m000255 © NASA/JSC.
Thinking through the gd:c research focus has sharpened my view of these analogue sites. Approaching laboratories through dis:connectivity unearths the tension between the planetary and the global. The planetary refers to processes that exceed human scale and control, while the global names the infrastructures and institutions through which those processes are stabilised, managed and governed. Planetary analogues, understood as laboratories, sit precisely in between. They translate planetary uncertainty into global regimes of knowledge and governance, often producing new asymmetries while promising preparedness and resilience.

Digital plants laboratory showcasing global dis:connections. Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona, 2025, Information Plus Conference at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge. (Images courtesy of the artists.)

  In this reciprocal way, my research shapes the research focus as a shared space of inquiry, always in dialogue with our fellows’ projects, each coming from a different disciplinary and methodological perspective. The research focus likewise continues to sharpen my understanding of laboratories as sites where the planetary and the global rarely align seamlessly, but instead meet through friction, negotiation and experimentation. This is what makes laboratories such fertile ground for research at gd:c. Continue Reading
17 February 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

gd:c voices: 3 postdocs – 3 research focusses – 2 questions

Dis:connectivity is at the heart of our work at gd:c. Instead of seeing globalisation as a linear process of increasing integration or fragmentation, dis:connectivity assumes connection and disconnection occur simultaneously through absences, detours and interruptions. Dis:connectivity is not an anomaly of globalisation; it’s what gives globalisation form. After having looked at absences, detours and interruptions across historical periods, regions and disciplines, we’re now turning our attention to cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity. These focusses help us to coordinate our research and to compare our results. They also let all our individual projects speak to one another with a common vocabulary. In this ReFocus mini-series, our three postdocs introduce the three research focusses they coordinate. Aliena Guggenberger, Susanne Quitmann and Clemens Finkelstein each reflect on how their particular focus enriches globalisation research and outline how their own projects and collaborations at gd:c are shaped through cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity.

Aliena, Susanne and Clemens (from left to right)

What does your research focus explore?

AG: Infrastructure is commonly understood as a set of economic facilities, such as transportation and communication networks. A cultural perspective emphasises how infrastructure shapes social relations. For example, while airports facilitate physical exchange and connections around the globe, cultural infrastructure enables social interaction through various activities and spaces, including art. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, conceptualises representational spaces (unlike planned or conceived space) as users live in them, experience them and endow them with meaning through images, narratives and embodied practices. 

Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, MoMA New York 2010 (Image: Andrew Russeth via Wikimedia)

For me, that means cultural infrastructure plays an active role in constituting our shared knowledge. Places like theatres, museums, libraries, archives and cultural heritage sites support the creation and preservation of artifacts and performances. In their digital expansion, these institutions operate as globally accessible platforms, revealing intersections between various collections, like Google Arts and Culture does. Yet such innovation can also concentrate power and restrict/limit access as well, since each institution curates its own content and presents its own narrative. I like exploring how the immediate geographic locations of cultural infrastructures contextualise their history and how they encourage participation and critical thinking beyond their locations.

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

SQ: Research on globalisation and global dis:connectivity has mostly focused on spaces and spatial relationships, like laboratories and cultural infrastructures. But time is just as important. Disruptions, absences and detours are as much about space as they are about time. They involve pauses, delays and haste. Time is a central variable in both the natural sciences and the humanities. In the sciences, time is mostly an objective, measurable value. In the humanities, by contrast, time is something people experience and interpret.

Watching time pass (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

Societies, groups and individuals can have different temporalities. Everyone experiences and lives in time, but research tends to overlook it. This began to change with the temporal turn in the humanities and the social sciences in the early 21st century, when researchers started to examine how time operates in areas ranging from the arts to social and environmental history. While some of this work touches on the issue of globalisation, and some studies of globalisation address temporality, the connection between processes of globalisation and temporality is still not fully understood.

Map of current de facto time zones as of March 2025 (UnaitxuGV, Heitordp and others via Wikimedia)

CF: I understand laboratories in a broad sense. For me, they include not only scientific research sites but also observatories, field stations, archives, exhibition spaces, simulation environments as well as artistic and design studios. Across these diverse settings, laboratories operate in similar ways: they simplify complexity, translate environments into models and data, and they stage the global as something that can be compared, tested and anticipated.

Laboratory settings across time and practice: (top) Art Lab in the Park by Street Lab, Queens Museum, NYC (2020) - a series of socially-distanced open-air art studio sessions, photo: © Street Lab (CC BY-NC 4.0); (left) An alchemist in his laboratory with his family: to the right they are shown calling at the poorhouse, destitute after the husband's failed experiments. Engraving after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1558. Wellcome Collection 35278i (Public Domain); (right) Quantum Lab - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) (2020). Two-color pulse sequences are generated for spin lifetime and spin coherence measurements in a dilution refrigerator. Photo: © ORNL (CC BY 2.0).

This is why I see laboratories as a connective hinge between the other research focusses at gd:c. As cultural infrastructures, they organise access, visibility and authority in knowledge production; as temporal devices, they structure anticipation, delay, repetition and projection. Laboratories are often imagined as controlled spaces that are removed from the world they study. Yet from the perspective of globalisation research, I approach them less as enclosed environments than as sites where global relations are assembled, interrupted and reconfigured. This helps me explore them as spaces of dis:connectivity in which elements of the world are temporarily extracted from their contexts, transformed into objects of knowledge and reconnected in new, often asymmetrical ways.

How does your research focus enrich globalisation research and how is the focus related to dis:connectivity?

CF: Seen through the lens of dis:connectivity, I approach laboratories as anything but neutral sites. The experiments they house select and abstract some connections while obscuring others. Knowledge produced in laboratories often circulates globally, while the material, social and ecological consequences of experimentation remain unevenly distributed. This asymmetry is no accident: historically, laboratories have been closely linked to imperial, extractive and modernising projects, while also serving as spaces of critique and alternative world-making.

Planetary laboratories and their dis:connected worlds of science, technology and extraction: (left) the Columbus Laboratory module aboard the International Space Station, where experiments abstract planetary processes under microgravity, photo: © NASA; (right) the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine in Western Australia, an extractive landscape whose materials — gold among them, integral to aerospace electronics—circulate into orbital infrastructures, even as the social and ecological costs of extraction remain unevenly grounded, photo: © Calistemon (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What interests me in particular is how laboratories today increasingly operate as anticipatory sites. In the context of climate change, technological acceleration and planetary transformation, they are where futures are modelled, risks are simulated, and thresholds are crossed. Studying laboratories as sites of dis:connectivity allows me to situate future-oriented debates in historical analyses of globalisation, tracing how experimental spaces and built environments have always shaped the governance of human and more-than-human futures under conditions of polycrisis and existential risk.

Anticipatory laboratories staging speculative futures of dis:connected globalisation beyond Earth. Cylindrical Colonies for a population of over a million (1976). Image: © NASA Ames Research Center / Rick Guidice - AC75-1086.

SQ: Our research at gd:c has only just begun to explore the relationship between temporality and global dis:connectivity. However, rereading existing scholarship through the lens of temporality, we see that the connection was there all along. Adding the two concepts of temporal dis:connectivity and dis:connected temporalities can only enrich our investigations. Temporality is central to how we experience globalisation and deglobalisation as well as to public debates about these phenomena, from fast-moving financial markets and disrupted supply chains to migrants waiting in transit and the idea of uneven historical change in different parts of the world.

Renaissance table clock (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

I am particularly interested in the latter phenomenon: the perception of diverging civilisational temporalities and varying cultural and political references between the present, the past and the future. I would argue that  focussing on temporalities in  the study of globalisation and dis:connectivity helps us better understand how global dis:connections are made, strained and experienced.

Arriving ship on a pocket watch (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

AG: Considering cultural infrastructure as a material framework helps make the highly theorised and complex research on globalisation more tangible to me. Cultural activities and spaces are visible platforms for discussing global narratives, whether they are brought to life on stage, presented loudly in public conversations or, more subtly, documented in books or materialised through exhibits. All these experiences foster critical thinking.  During the COVID-19 pandemic I first truly recognised the importance of cultural infrastructure not only as space for artistic expression, a repository of collective memory, but also as a connector. Debates about whether cultural infrastructure counts as an essential service shook its foundations and challenged its resilience. Ongoing cuts to the budgets of cultural institutions reinforce the injustice in disparate access and participation, forfeiting potential connection and replacing it with greater isolation.

Design exhibition (Salone des Mobile), Milan (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

While these micro-fractures may be hard to see, the vulnerability of cultural infrastructure is unmistakable in its symbolic and public positioning. It is exposed to digital threats such as cyberattacks as well as to analogue forms of violence, including the deliberate targeting and destruction of cultural heritage sites in times of war.

Ruins of a theatre in Mariupol (Image: Lirhan2016 via Wikimedia)

In the current political climate, I think it is more essential than ever to promote and practice intercultural dialogue. It is therefore inspiring to see how the diverse approaches at gd:c – scholarly research as well as artists’ perspectives – uncover striking parallels in the study of global and local cultural infrastructure. This shared knowledge encourages a can-do attitude and collaboration, even beyond our time here. [Editor's note: the interview continues here.] Continue Reading
20 January 2026