ABSTRACT
On his death, Jarman was buried in the hat; before then, the necklace had been buried in his garden but the artist cheated time and restructured the memento mori, leaving only traces of gilt from the original planting in the soil. This chapter is concerned with similarly unexpected reversals of, and loops in, time which characterised fashion from the 1990s, scrambling and re-ordering its chronology like the inscription ‘today, tomorrow, yesterday’. The chapter maps out the way in which the past spools back into the present and reverberates into the future in contemporary fashion.1 That this temporal scrambling could occur with particular intensity from the 1990s onwards was due, in part, to the pre-eminence of the image in contemporary culture. This chapter looks at the way in which fashion mutated in the digital culture of the late twentieth-century and, in particular, how history and image were imbricated in its new formations.
