Violence and Western Fashion, 1914–2014

Abstract

Fashion has a significant relationship with its social, political, and economic context, and is able to trigger, reflect, and respond to wider changes. When such changes involve violence, horror, or trauma, this process has particular ramifications due to fashion’s deep intertwinement with the body, both physically and conceptually. From depictions in luxury fashion magazines of headless women after World War I, to ghostly interpretations of death as the Internet took hold in the 2000s, fashion and violence have shared a unique connection. Violence can be found, implicitly and explicitly, across fashion’s multiple layers: object, body, and image. The forms that violence manifests itself within include notions of physical assault, fragmentation, psychological violence, sexual violence, the abject, and deathliness, which will be explored in chronological order across the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. The eruption of violence onto the surface of fashion—which itself serves as an external surface to the body—exposes important revelations about the individual and society from which it is spawned.