Prefigured: Fashion and Exhibition-Making, Judith Clark SPBH Editions

Prefigured: Fashion and Exhibition-Making is a book that examines how fashion exhibitions are conceived and constructed. It draws on nearly three decades of work by Judith Clark, one of the curators who helped define the field.

Organised around the core elements of making an exhibition – reference, context, mannequins, narrative devices and the spatial choreography of objects and viewers – the book reveals the idiosyncratic thinking behind Clark’s exhibitions. For Clark, the exhibition is a narrative environment, a space where garments, archives and spatial design open new ways of seeing fashion. 

In the late 1990s Clark opened an experimental gallery dedicated to fashion in London, the first of its kind, at a moment when the discipline was only beginning to take shape. Since then she has created influential exhibitions for institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, ModeMuseum Antwerp, Palazzo Pitti, La Triennale Milano and the Barbican, helping to transform how fashion is displayed, interpreted and discussed in museums worldwide. 

SPBH Editions, 208pp, 17cm x 24cm, illustrated paperback, 2026