Judith Clark — Prefigured: Fashion and Exhibition-Making

Judith Clark sets out how she thinks through and builds a fashion exhibition, drawing on close to thirty years of her own curatorial work.

The book follows the working parts of an exhibition: references and context, mannequins, the devices that carry a story, and the way objects and visitors are placed and move through a room. For Clark an exhibition is a setting for a narrative, in which clothes, archive material and the design of the space together change how fashion is seen.

Born in Rome and trained in architecture at the Bartlett and the Architectural Association, in 1997 Clark opened the Judith Clark Costume Gallery, a Notting Hill space given over to fashion at a time when fashion curating was barely a discipline; it staged twenty-one exhibitions. Her later shows include Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, made with ModeMuseum Antwerp and shown at the V&A in 2005, and The Vulgar: Fashion Re-defined at the Barbican in 2016. She has also worked with Palazzo Pitti and La Triennale Milano.

SPBH Editions, 2026. 208 pages, paperback, 17 x 23.5 cm.