Published to coincide with a groundbreaking exhibition opening at MoMu, Antwerp in September 2004, then in the V&A's Contemporary space in February 2005. As both curator and exhibition designer, Judith Clark addresses the relationship of contemporary fashion to history, creating a collage of visual references which offer a fascinating insight into the origins of current themes such as alienation, trauma, and phantasmagoria. Details of historic dress and images of 19th-century fairground architecture lead into the work of contemporary designers such as Viktor and Rolf, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Christian Lacroix and Shelley Fox. The installation draws on a skeletal early industrial/metropolitan aesthetic while the mannequins belong to the history of dolls and wax effigies, embodied in the mask-like catwalk make-up of Pat McGrath. The catalogue includes a coda by fashion historian Caroline Evans, author of Fashion at the Edge, from whom Clark has drawn assumptions about contemporary dress, and a piece on the idea of scaffold by Russian avant-grade architect Yuri Awakumov as well as his sketches developed for the show. from the celebrated New York fashion illustrator Reuben Toledo.