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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 In some cases, contemporary designers deliberately draw on historical references and the established house codes of brands like Balenciaga, Chanel or Dior, creating collections that both acknowledge the past and meet the audience’s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