Fashion historian and theorist Caroline Evans has described herself as someone who lives very much in her head. But as she explains in this email interview, her interest has always been in applied rather than pure theory, as it relates to contemporary visual culture. She also loves interacting with the students at Central Saint Martins, where she is Professor of Fashion History and Theory. In her now iconic study of fashion in the 1990s, ‘Fashion at the Edge’, she used theory as a set of tools for thinking, drawing equally on images, objects, and ideas. In her new book, ‘The Mechanical Smile’, she traces the earliest history of the fashion show, a topic that is basically unexplored within fashion studies. In the process, she also found herself dealing with the idea of fashion as a situated, embodied and spatial practice. Fleeting moments of lived experience – the walk, the smile, the pose, the gestures, the attitude. Interview by Maria Ben Saad