CAIS Brownbag Seminar: Delacey TEDESCO – Fashioning Spatiotemporal Politics in an Urban World.

The world of fashion offers a globally extensive site through which the spatiotemporal boundaries of politics in the contemporary urban condition are configured and reconfigured. The urban and the fashionable are inseparably imbricated in modernity, though the political implications are rarely made explicit. This paper first draws out the modern political configuration implicit in a singular “fashion space” and a linear “fashion present.” I then argue that the spatial and temporal transformations challenging the modern world of fashion offer crucial insights into the inconsistent but pervasive challenges that global urbanization poses to the established spatiotemporal boundaries of the modern world of politics. Drawing on recent changes to the cycle of fashion seasons and purchase schedules and changing locations of fashion events, I theorize emergent multi-temporal and multi-spatial configurations of politics.