The history of any museum is as much made up of its exhibitions as by the sum of its permanent collections. These events mark moments in time, and changes in attitudes, for curators collect ideas as well as objects. Fashion marks moments in time with particular resonance, not only because it continually changes but also because it is a discipline charged with the essence of the present, imbued with the history of the past and full of potency for the future. In the words of French critic Roland Barthes: ’Every new fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding fashion? This refusal to inherit gives fashion great immediacy, for fashion captures the zeitgeist from Dior’s New Look of 1947, through Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s anarchic T-shirts and bondage trousers of the ’70s to the supermodern clothing of the zeros, described by Andrew Bolton as ’a response to the increasingly alienating spaces of contemporary urban life’.

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Valerie Mendes
Introduction
’I Try Not to Fear Radical Things’
Clahe Wilcox
Looking Forward
Historical Futurism
Judith Clark
Radical Traditionalists
Azzedine Alaia & Jean Paul Gaultier
Susannah Frankel
’A Dress is No Longer a Little, Flat Closed Thing’
lssey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto & Juwa Watanabe
Amy de la ttaye
Imagining Fashion
Helmut Lang & Maison Martin Margiela
Alistair O’Neill
’Style in Revolt’
Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen & Vivienne Westwood
Valerie Sleele
The Designers
Azzedine Alaia
Hussein Chalayan
Comme des Garcons
Jean Paul 6aultier
Helmut Lang
Alexander McQueen
Maison Martin Margiela
Issey Miyake
Junya Watanabe Comme des Garcons
Vivienne Westwood
Yohji Yamamoto
Bibliography
Picture Captions & Credit Lines
Index