Yet, for Bourdieu commodities are closed entities of
distinction and class taste, the object of consump-
tion is a “finished product” (Bourdieu 1996: 231). In
Bourdieu’s perspective fashion can only be about
buying or having, not of doing. He sees the division
between production and consumption as unbridge-
able and leaves no room for co-authorship, consum-
er interventions or “poaching”, forms of participa-
tion exemplified by cultural theorist Michel De
Certeau (1984).
Fashion is re-enacting historical rituals in our con-
temporary society and many call upon ancient tra-
ditions. In The Death of Fashion Harald Gruendl
(2007) examines the connection between fashion
sales and Dionysian rituals. These rituals are about
myths, but they are not necessarily religious or
deeply connected to faith. He means that rituals
“separate the profane from the sacred. Sacred not
mean religious, but as apart of the everyday.” (26)
Gruendl bases his analysis on a reference by Ni-
etzsche, which Roland Barthes uses in The Fashion
System (1983). Where Nietzsche meant that there is
a continuing existence of the Dionysus cults, Bar-
thes sees that “spring Fashion, for the modern wom-
an, is like what the Great Dyonysia or Anthesteria
were for the ancient Greeks” (Barthes 1983: 251).
Gruendl also examines how fashion is connected to
the carnivalesque rituals of civilization and how the
rites representing the life and death of gods are con-
nected to various feasts that make social relations
stable throughout the shifts of time and to preserve
ritual equilibrium.
Gruendl means that the ancient gods who guaran-
teed stability and meaning in the world are in our
contemporary society replaced by the order of the
“commodity cosmos” in which our main ritual is
the ritual of shopping. “While Christ is related to
the realm of the spirit, Santa Claus represents the
realm of material abundance [he] is the god of con-
sumption” (21). Gruendl sees that the shift where
Santa Claus now becomes the new god of Christmas
is similar to the change between meanings of rituals
and festivals when Christianity replaced pagan
rites.
The strategy of consumer culture is to replace a fes-
tival thus far celebrated in order to start a parasitic
life, which in the end kills the original festival. Sev-
eral tribal festivals were overlaid by Christian rites to
prevent heathen customs. (22)Rituals change over time according to new cultural
conditions and their meanings disappear even faster.
Today few people know the original meaning of the
Christmas tree and Gruendl assumes that in a couple
of years few will know the original meaning of
Christmas, even if the ritual might still be performed
to stabilize the institution of the family through the
exchange of commodities (23).
Like ancient rituals before, ours serve the purpose of
transferring basic human needs from the social di-
mension into the responsibility of consumer culture
(47). But there are always questions of power related
to the exercise of rituals.Primitive agrarian societies anxiously awaited the
return of vegetation in spring. Consumer societies,
in contrast, worry about the periodical advent of the
new trend. Like our ancestors we, too, create rites in
order to exert control over nature. Rituals create
power; they do not give form to power. (45)Rituals manifest the power over symbolic communication
and elites within every system of belief wields this power.
For Gruendl the power over our rituals is today slowly
taken over by consumerism.As shown earlier, Gruendl’s comparison between
fashion and religious rituals is not something new
and it is a metaphor that is both helpful and mislead-
ing. To call shopping malls “cathedrals of consump-
tion” is nowadays something of a cliché. As with
Gruendl’s examples it connotes commodities to
icons of worship, shopping to religious services and
consumers to believers, yet this cannot be an ana-
logue relation. Media theorist John Fiske is just like
Gruendl interested in the power relations of rituals.
Fiske points out that this common metaphor is
strong because it highlights certain aspects of the
rituals of consumption. The metaphor of consumer-
ism-as-religionis both attractive and common precisely because it
does convey and construct a knowledge of consum-
erism; it does point to one set of “truths,” however
carefully selected a set. (Fiske 1989: 13)For Fiske, the metaphor is helpful when investigating
the power of consumerism, but not for understand-
ing the power of the consumer. For him, the main
difference between consumerism and religion lies in
the religious congregation’s powerlessness, that they
are “led like sheep through the rituals and meanings”
(13) and that they need to “buy” the whole truth of