The Death of Fashion: The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window

275 Pages·2007·1.21 MB·English

by  Harald Grundl

4y SpringerWienNewYork
Harald Gruendl, EOOS
The Death of Fashion.
The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window.
The Death of Fashion.
The Passage Rite of Fashion in the Show Window.
Harald Gruendl, EOOS
www.eoos.com
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material
is concerned, specifically those of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, broadcasting,
reproduction by photocopying machines or similar means, and storage in data banks.
Product Liability
The publisher can give no guarantee for the information contained in this book. The use
of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of
specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations
and therefore free for general use.
© 2007 Springer-Verlag/Wien
Printed in Austria
SpringerWienNewYork is a part of
Springer Science + Business Media
springeronline.com
Graphic Design
Günter Eder, Roman Breier
grafisches Büro
Copyediting, translation
Nita Tandon
Printing and binding: A. Holzhausens Nfg., A-1140 Wien
Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper
SPIN: 11941842
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006939202
With 44 mostly coloured figures
ISBN-13 978-3-211-49854-5
SpringerWienNewYork

Contents
9 Preface
13 Ritual and Image The Fashion System
Consumer Beliefs
Ritualisation
Fashion Cycle
Ritual Mastery
The Sales Window
Intuitive Images
73 Visual Lexicon
89 City Walks PARIS
VIENNA
LONDON
NEW YORK
HAMBURG
211 The Death of Fashion
241 Summary Mythology
Procession
Sacrifice
Magic
The Death of Fashion
269 Intuitive Images
285 Index List of Illustrations
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
The
Death
of
Fashion
Preface
This work is about the ugly. To be more precise, it is about the ugly
show window that appears twice a year –during the seasonal
sales of fashion when, strikingly enough, the visual economy of
beauty is disrupted by the impact of the unsightly. We will call
this Dionysian period the “death of fashion”. Once the fashion
collection of the past season is no longer in fashion, the period
of the seasonal sales becomes the transitional phase between
the old and the new collection. It seems to us as if documenting
the ugly is a taboo today as merchandising literature is replete
with images of the beautiful show windows. But what about
the ugly window? The one scene never found on ancient Greek
vases is the solemn moment in which the victim is sacrificed
ceremonially. Is the “death of fashion” only a rational act of selling
out leftovers, or is it something more meaningful? The fashion
industry has perfected the ways of introducing new commodities,
presenting a new generation of aesthetically different products
twice a year. Catwalk shows in major fashion capitals stage
these new collections in a ritualised way and the fashion industry
organises and attends to the Apollonian festival during which the
new collection is born. In contrast, the seasonal sale window is
naked and instead of being clad in an expensive evening dress, the
naked mannequin is merely clothed in packing paper. Rather than
using a distinctive graphic design, window dressers write by hand.
How does fashion die in the show window? Is it a silent death,
is it a murder, or is it a sacrifice? Whatever the case may be it
is a high publicity event. The question lies somewhere between
the production of fashion and its consumption. The “death of
fashion”, however, refers to the displayed garment and not to the
garment worn, the seasonal sale being its last chapter and the
end of a seasonal collection. We wanted to find out how this end
is dramatised in the retail theatre. Do window dressers use any
intuitive images? To what extent is the consumer involved in a
ritualised “death of fashion”?
The
Death
of
Fashion 9
We decided to do a ‘visual’ research in four major European cities
during the sales period in order to acquire basic material, which
could subsequently be used to analyse the dramatisation and
to discover its underlying patterns. We also wanted to know
whether we could find instructions for dressing the seasonal sale
window. Are there any illustrations in professional magazines?
Do books on “the art of window dressing” deal with the seasonal
sale window, or is this not an art form? We not only wanted to
involve literature on the aesthetics of the show window, but
also literature that helps understand the ritual and performative
dimension of dramatisation. Alongside literature dealing with
the ritual dimension of consumer behaviour, we also involved
literature on ritualisation in design and marketing in order to
understand whether marketing or merchandising deal consciously
with the designing of rituals.
This book aims to base its discourse on the research of intuitive
images and meaningful actions; it is a search for hidden
mythologies and the reinterpretation of such ancient social
practices as rituals. It is also a kind of “poetic analysis”1 of our
contemporary condition. Jean Baudrillard wrote that the
presentation of commodities is not in itself convincing, but it
is a necessary precondition for rationalising the act of buying.2
Mary Douglas, on the other hand, pointed out that the general
assumption that “shopping is a fully rational activity” has
been rejected by consumer theory which discovered “utterly
implausible limitations on that rationality”.3The “death of
fashion” is a balance between the rationalisation of the act of
buying and irrational basic emotions related to the system of
fashion. Our interest in the following chapters lies in a careful
excavation of stimulating dramatisations.
This book is written in English and has been copyedited. The
footnotes of all translations from German into English are
marked with an asterisk*.
1 This term was coined by EOOS to describe its approach to design research.
2 Baudrillard (1996:166).
3 Douglas (1992:115).
10
Ritual and
Image
“In this visual flood of images, there is still hope for reviving the
wild primal settings of the image. In a certain way, each image
has preserved something wild and incredible, but intuition is
capable of retrieving this “punctum”, this secret of the image,
provided we take the image in its literal sense. And it is up
to us to want this literalness, this secret; it is up to us to let it
flow and put an end to this widespread aestheticisation, to this
intellectual technology of culture.”4
4 Baudrillard (1999:36)*.
The
Death
of
Fashion 13