The Fashion Businessstructural similarities beneath its surface. If there is a similarity, it is in the
spectacular patterns of consumption of the nineteenth-century modernist city,
specifically Paris, a city in which women frequently stage themselves as
spectacle, be it the bourgeoisie consumers of the department stores, or the
more ambiguously coded showgirl. Woman, like the image itself, is an
unstable sign.
And if there is a difference, it is that the spectacle in the 1990s has mutated
into pure image. Never before have so many seen so much of what goes on
behind its closed doors; but only as a representation. Spectacle is not
represented in these haute couture fashion shows, as the visits to the moon
or the Far East were supposedly represented in the cinéoramas or dioramas
of the nineteenth century; now the spectacle is a representation. Print and
digital media have taken the space occupied by world fares, and we consume
this kind of spectacle primarily through visual media: magazines, newspapers,
television, the Internet and video.^58 If the technology improves to give pictures
of high enough quality, even fashion photography could become digitalized
in the future, banishing film. The photographer would licence the magazine
to use the images he transmitted to them electronically, via the computer,
making analogue techniques of reproduction outmoded, perhaps appro-
priately for a kind of fashion which can be consumed exclusively as image
not as object. Couture clothing will never appear in the shops. Its appearance
to us as image is phantasmagoric. And, appropriately, the role of the fashion
show has changed with its increasing public visibility. No longer necessary
to sell the clothes to buyers and clients, for the collection will have been sold
a few weeks before the show, it remains a ghostly spectacle, a view into a
designer’s mind, captured fleetingly in images. As such, it evokes Susan
Sontag’s claim that ‘a society becomes “modern” when one of its chief
activities is producing and consuming images’.^59
Yet these images are not free-floating signifiers but part of a network of
signs which constitute an expanded ‘society of the spectacle’. In the 1990s,
Galliano was described by the British fashion journalist Sally Brampton as
‘the greatest 3-D image-maker alive’. Brampton argued that he was partly
responsible for the greatly increased attendance at the Paris shows, which
she described as ‘a media feeding frenzy as newspapers and television stations
around the world give increasing prominence to fashion’.^60 These images do
not exist in some rarefied realm of art for art’s sake, but as a commercial
- Throughout the majority of the twentieth-century the couture houses prohibited the
use of cameras at the collections and press photographs of fashion shows only became common
in the 1980s and 1990s. - Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 153.