The Fashion Businessand Marie Antoinette at the Trianon. These historical displays of fashion
randomly juxtaposed Byzantine empresses, medieval ladies and eighteenth-
century queens side by side, creating continuity solely through the splendour
of their costume, erasing significant historical difference. Galliano’s eclectic
historical pastiche has something of this quality. In the 1900 exhibition twenty
couture houses were represented, including Worth, Rouff (established in
1884), Paquin (established 1891) and Callot Soeurs (1896). Modern society
was represented by scenes of society life, such as ‘the departure for the opera’,
or ‘a fitting at Worth’. The style of these displays resurfaced, particularly, in
the staging of the Dior Spring-Summer ready-to-wear 1998 show, in a series
of classical rooms dressed with period furniture and a harpsichord, around
which the models draped themselves like Hollywood starlets from the 1930s.
The tableaux vivants they formed recalled the wax tableaux behind glass of
the 1900 exhibition, with their simulations of the luxury and extravagance
of haute couture.
For the Dior couture show that same season Galliano created a giant crowd
scene, a fantasy carnival of confetti and human figures in apparently endless
celebration. Yet it would be wrong to confuse this fantasy crowd with the
actual crowd of a Parisian international exhibition of the late nineteenth
century. The crowds at such world fairs consisted essentially of middle, lower-
middle and sometimes working-class people; the displays made luxury and
excess available as a spectacle to the many who, while they could afford the
entrance ticket, could never aspire to owning the exclusive and expensive
consumer goods on display. The exclusivity of the couture show has more in
common, perhaps, in its studied artifice and minute attention to detail, with
Huysmans novel À Rebours of 1888. Its dandyish and fastidious hero Des
Esseintes constructs a dream world as a counterpoint to what he sees as the
nightmare of mass consumption. Rosalind Williams argues that À Rebours
‘makes a powerful case for the seductiveness of a dream world – the
fascination of artifice, the beauty of the imagination, the pleasure of self-
deception, the flattering sense of initiation into mysteries’.^18 All these could
equally describe the allure of the couture show, and couture has always been
at pains to differentiate itself from the mass market. Yet, Williams goes on
to argue, decadence is never free from mass consumption because it shares
the same desire to be ahead of the rest, and condemns its followers to the
same restless pursuit of novelty. They are doomed to the same disappointment
because they have invested too many expectations in the world of goods.
- Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century
France, Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1982, p. - Williams argues that dandyism, and Huysman’sÀ Rebours, were an élitist challenge to
mass consumption.