Fashion Fragments - Elizabeth Kutesko ed.

This book brings together a selection of academic essays produced by MA Fashion Histories & Theories students at Central Saint Martins in the 2025 cohort. It uses fragments to rewrite fashion histories by moving overlooked voices to the centre of historical narratives, whilst thinking about alternative temporalities, cosmologies, relationalities and ways of being in the world. What is clear from the topics and approaches chosen by the students is a shared effort to nuance or complicate fashion’s histories, using theory as an analytical tool. The text can be read as a collection of fashion fragments – ‘the tiny spark of contingency’ to draw on Walter Benjamin’s method of using photographic fragments to rewrite history from below (1980 [1931] pp. 242-3) – which underlines the potency of the splinter or crack to intervene in grand narratives and challenge linear understandings of the relationship between past, present and future. It is not an exhaustive history of fashion, but a revisionist approach that interrogates history as a discipline whilst illuminating the transnational networks of exchange and influence that support multiple fashion systems.

Texts by 
Zaudita Fender
Charlotte Lewis
Bella Temple
Carolina Valente d'Almeida Grancho
Elena Mullen 
Chloe de Uphaugh
Noah Mackay-Pritchard
Holiday Morris
Ekaterina Dmitrievna Sannikova 
Margaux Merz
Yiming Sun 
Harry Palmer 
Paige Urquhart

Elizabeth Kutesko, 2025 
Softcover, 205pp with inserts
200 x 130mm