The Cinderella of the Arts

At some point in the late 1990s, I finally admitted defeat. Fashion bewildered me. The more outlandish the fashion shows became, the more cautiously women actually chose to dress. While Hussein Chalayan devised a skirt which doubled up as a wooden coffee table and Alexander McQueen inserted live worms beneath a tight transparent plastic bustier, the rest of womankind grabbed for their anonymous, asexual black/grey/brown trouser-suit. The more spectacular and shocking the shows fashion designers staged in Paris and elsewhere, the more women chose wardrobes to blend in with their male colleagues, corralling their femininity to the privacy of the bedroom.

When Comme des Garçons put two young men with shaved heads, in dressing gowns and striped pyjamas with numbers on them, on the catwalk on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995, it seemed experimental fashion had reached an irredeemable point of self-indulgent profiteering. It had plundered the past for images to shock and titillate in a bid to shift more perfumes and handbags. An industry of aggressive self-promotion, it corrupted all who came into contact with it - from the skinny 15-year-olds upon whom it eagerly pounced, to the fashion editors upon whom it lavished gifts and special favours. It represented the most hideous face of mass consumer capitalism in its voracious search for novelty and notoriety.

Given such prejudices, it's some achievement of a book published this month, Fashion at the Edge, that it has succeeded in convincing me that I only ever grasped half the story. Yes, fashion is all of the above, but also much more. Indeed, author Caroline Evans makes bold claims: fashion is the "dream world of capitalism". More than any other form of artistic expression, it portrays our ambivalence about consumer capitalism, and acts out our hidden desires and fears. The bleakness of much of the imagery of experimental fashion at the turn of the millennium reflects the traumas of a terrible century, and an increasing anxiety at the pace of change.

Take one of Diesel's adverts from the mid-90s: an aerial view of a multiple car crash with models strewn on the ground. Bright, cheerful colours, beautiful clothes and beautiful bodies for a macabre image of death. Evans's argument is that it is experimental fashion which captures the paradoxes of contemporary life: fascination with beauty and youth is inseparable from the fear of death and decay. Hence those worms squashed against the model's chest. Or the image of a model lying on a bed of human skulls and bones - in a century where such accumulations of human remains became an horrific commonplace.

In 1999, JG Ballard predicted that in time the 20th century would come to be regarded as barbarous, and that "debased entertainment and package-tour hedonism would be inextricably linked to Auschwitz and Hiroshima". Evans points out that unbeknown to Ballard, those links had already been made by fashion designers.

Experimental fashion didn't attempt to tidy, sanitise or orchestrate the optimism required by market capitalism. On the contrary, while consumer culture aestheticised our homes and bodies, experimental fashion idealised ugliness, the ungainly, the misfit. Clothes were torn, ripped, tacked together; faces were masked, encased in bandages or even wooden pods. This kind of fashion had very little to do with beauty and a lot to do with concepts of how we create our sense of self and identity - and do that largely through clothes.

By the end of the book, I was gripped. So what do I do now? Try to get into a fashion show? No chance - fashion journalists are always fighting for seats. Forget reports of fashion shows with their lists of this season's looks and insider references. This kind of fashion sheds no light on what to actually wear; it's an art form close to theatre or an art installation, but has never received the kind of recognition and state patronage given to either. This is the Cinderella of the arts, dependent on celebrities and multinationals for its erratic funding.

Even more bizarrely, it's an art form with an audience which largely has an entirely different agenda - buying and selling clothes. So why are they the ones to bag the seats for a show like Alexander McQueen's £70,000 15-minute spectacular in 2000-01 (it included, among other things, live exotic moths, a sheath dress of razor shells and a skirt of oyster shells), in which the audience had to stare at themselves in the mirrored box which dominated the catwalk for half an hour - it may make telling comments on narcissism, vanity and self-consciousness, but not many heard them.

So here is an art form in search of an audience. An art form which has singularly failed to establish its own legitimacy with the kind of audience who would be most intrigued by what it has to say. Why is Tate Modern teeming with the kind of audience Alexander McQueen deserves? Why is fashion so riddled with snobbery (of our boring jeans and trainers) that more of us are not allowed to join this exclusive, elitist conversation?

Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness by Caroline Evans is published by Yale University Press