Prefigured: Fashion and Exhibition-Making examines how fashion exhibitions are conceived and constructed, drawing on nearly three decades of work by Judith Clark, one of the curators who helped define the field. Organised around the core elements of exhibition-making – 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.