John Galliano: Modernity and Spectacleand marketing stratagem. Stéphane Wagner, professor and lecturer in
communications at the Institut Français de la Mode said in 1997, ‘If we
accept that much of haute couture is about squeezing out maximum media
coverage – good or bad – then the more spectacular the presentation and
collection, the better. And from that point of view the English are the best
by far’.^61
Although traditionally Paris has been a centre of luxury, London has always
had the edge in terms of imaginative presentation. This is due in part to the
system of education in certain British art and design schools, in part to the
comparative lack of infrastructure in Britain, so that young designers leaving
college have nothing to loose and everything to gain by putting on spectacular
and extravagant shows which will catch the attention of press and buyers.
For them, as for their Victorian predecessors in the production of consumer
goods, the spectacle is ‘the theatre through which capitalism acts’.^62 Most
practically, it is how they will get a backer. In rare cases, it may lead to them
being recruited by a major Parisian couture house. Spectacle, therefore, does
not function outside of the realms of consumption and discourse but, rather,
from within those structures, as their ‘voice’. What is new, however, is the
way that new technology and communications have expanded the network
of spectacle into the new visual media.
60.Guardian,14 October 1998.- Quoted in: Stephen Todd, ‘The Importance of Being English’,Blueprint, March 1997,
p. 42. - Thomas Richards provides a useful model of the application of Debord’s ideas to
nineteenth-century Britain in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle, 1851–1914, London & New York: Verso, 1991, p. 251.