Serious Frivolities with Judith Watt
Illustrated talk
“In 1910,” the legendary publisher, art director and editor-in-chief Lucien Vogel told journalist Georges Charensol, “there was no really artistic fashion magazine, nothing representative of the spirit of the
time. My dream was therefore to make a luxury magazine with truly modern artists [Gazette du Bon Ton] … to offer a women’s magazine of a new type, artistic and representative of the times.”
Judith Watt knows these words well. She is a fashion historian who has a wealth of knowledge about twentieth-century fashion, and she traces the line from the iconic fashion of Quant’s sixties, Biba to punk in the seventies, the (not-so-) New Romantics of the eighties to the present day. What is design, couture, fashion? How do we record it and who are the caretakers of its history? Who better to ask those questions than Sarah Atkinson, who worked on the recent exhibition, The BIBA Story 1964-1975, at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London last year.
