LONDON, UK.- The Victoria & Albert Museum presents Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, on view through May 8, 2005. Spectres sets out to reveal the shadows and experiences that form a 'fashion memory' in contemporary dress. In showing the hidden, yet haunting, connections between recent fashion and its past, it uses pieces drawn from avant-garde designers, from the V&A fashion collection and from the archive at ModeMuseum in Antwerp.

Set up as a series of fairground attractions, Spectres invites the visitor into a labyrinth of associations: a shadow lantern throws silhouettes, enlarged maquettes look like games for grown-ups, rotating cogs make and break patterns.

In creating this experimental show, fashion curator Judith Clark invited fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo to provide the drawings, avant-garde jeweller Naomi Filmer to create mannequin prosthetics and fashion theorist Caroline Evans to lend quotations that evoke the complexity of dress today.