In 1938 the French government commissioned L’Herbier to make a short ‘fashion film’ La Mode revée to promote France’s haute couture at the 1939 New York’s World Fair. Taking place over an entire year, the fair caught its visitors up in bold visions of the future and the apparent certainties of the past. By the time it closed in the spring of 1940 the world would be changed forever. Taking the beautiful and rarely-seen La Mode revée as a point of departure, this event will meander through the fair’s fashion(able) exhibits, trying to make sense of their legacy. It will explore how L’Herbier’s own escapism through dream, fairy tale and lyricism sat with the rest of the fair’s own dreams for ‘The World of Tomorrow’. Your guides to fashions of the future will be Ken Hollings and Marketa Uhlirova.
Ken Hollings is a writer whose work has been featured in Sight and Sound, Frieze and Strange Attractor among others. He is the author of acclaimed books Destroy All Monsters (2001) and Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century 1947-1959 (2008).
Marketa Uhlirova is the director of Fashion in Film and a senior research fellow in Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She is the editor of If Looks Could Kill: Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence (2008) and Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (2013).