Books by Caroline Evans

Handbags: The Making of a Museum

by Adam Phillips, Claire Wilcox, Judith Clark, Caroline Evans, Amy de la Haye

An exploration of the role of the handbag in the history of culture, fashion, and material production

The history of the handbag—its design, how it has been made, used, and worn—reveals something essential about women's lives over the past 500 years. Perhaps the most universal item of fashionable adornment, it can also be elusive, an object of desire, secrecy, and even fear. Handbags explores these rich histories and multiple meanings.
This book features specially commissioned photographs of an extraordinary, newly formed collection of fashionable handbags that date from the 16th century to the present day. It has been acquired for exhibition in the first museum devoted to the handbag, in Seoul, South Korea. The project is a commission undertaken by experimental exhibition-maker Judith Clark, whose innovative practices are revealed in Handbags.
Essays by leading fashion historians and an acclaimed psychoanalyst investigate the history of gesture, the psychoanalysis of bags, and the museum's state-of-the-art mannequins and archive cabinets. In order to preserve the words that describe the unique qualities of each bag, a terminology of handbags has been compiled.

Published in association with the Simone Handbag Museum, Seoul

Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness

by Caroline Evans

What do images of illness, vampirism, wounds, and addiction say about contemporary fashion? An unexpected discussion of fashion and its relation to deep cultural anxieties

Recent experimental fashion has a dark side, a preoccupation with representations of death, trauma, alienation, and decay. This intriguing book looks closely at this strand of fashion design in the 1990s, exploring what its disturbing themes tell us about consumer culture and contemporary anxieties. Caroline Evans analyzes the work of experimental designers, the images of fashion photographers, and the spectacular fashion shows that developed in the final decade of the twentieth century to arrive at a new understanding of fashion’s dark side and what it signifies. Fashion at the Edge considersa range of cutting-edge contemporary fashion in unprecedented depth and detail, including the work of such current designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Viktor & Rolf. Contrasting images by photographers like Steven Meisel, Nick Knight, and Juergen Teller are also reviewed. Drawing on diverse perspectives from Marx to Walter Benjamin, Evans shows that fashion stands at the very center of the contemporary, and that it voices some of Western culture’s deepest concerns.

An Eye for Couture A Collector's Exploration of 20th Century Fashion

by Caroline Evans, Betül Basaran, Christine Ramphal

In this stunning book, one of the world's leading Asian art dealers reveals her passion project―collecting French haute couture from the twentieth century and telling the stories of the women who wore them.

An Eye for Couture presents and explores Francesca Galloway's collection of 20th-century haute couture and fashion, built over a period of thirty-five years. The book includes an outstanding group of over 100 pieces, concentrating of the work of couturiers who shaped fashion and whose pieces embodied the zeitgeist of their time. Among those featured in this book are Paul Poiret, Gabrielle Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Paco Rabanne.

These garments and accessories come to life through the women who wore them. Denise Poiret―Paul's muse, collaborator and model―is the subject of a specially commissioned essay. So is Princess Niloufer of Hyderabad, known as one of the most beautiful women in the world. She was photographed by Horst P. Horst for Vogue in 1939 and used her status to campaign for women's rights. The book also looks at the 1960s as a period where designers such as Paco Rabanne and Yves Saint Laurent were shaping ideas of the future, as well as the influence of Eastern design on haute couture.

One of the world's leading Asian Art dealers in Indian painting, courtly arts and Asian textiles, Francesca Galloway has curated many exhibitions and produced numerous publications on these subjects since the 1980s. With a curatorial perspective and an eye for design innovators and revolutionaries, an appreciation for the highest artistry and a sensibility for the influence of eastern design on haute couture, she has assembled a collection spanning more than one hundred pieces. The book's striking imagery is the result of a collaboration between a fashion photographer, set designer and costume conservator/dresser. The images are positioned between haute couture and still life photography to bring these pieces of fashion history to life.