John Galliano: Modernity and Spectacle

9

John Galliano:

Modernity and Spectacle

Caroline Evans*

This chapter starts by contrasting two sets of imagery: from the 1990s, the
luxurious, opulent and theatrical fashion shows of the fashion designer John
Galliano and, from the second half of the nineteenth century, the fantasy
displays, rides and optical illusions of the Parisian department store and world
fair. Walter Benjamin described this technique as ‘literary montage’, and he
wrote, perhaps disingenuously, ‘I have nothing to say, only to show.’^1 His
intention was, however, that the images would do the talking, not singly but
by virtue of their juxtaposition and arrangement. Benjamin’s ideas offer art
and design historians a complex and sophisticated model of how visual
seduction works, because his ideas are predicated on an understanding of
how visual similes function, something which other historians have not
privileged. His method allows us to perceive similarities across periods
apparently separated by rupture and discontinuity, and to plot historical time
not as something that flows smoothly from past to present but as a more
complex relay of turns and returns in which the past is activated by injecting
the present into it.^2

• This is an expanded version of the lecture given at Kingston University and I would like
  to thank the Arts & Humanities Research Board of Great Britain whose funding in 1999–
  2000 of the ‘Fashion & Modernity’ Research Group at Central Saint Martins College of Art
  and Design, London, enabled the further development of this paper.

1. Quoted in Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
   Project, Cambridge, Mass. & London , England: MIT Press, 1989. References in this chapter
   are to the paperback edition, 1991, pp. 73 & 222.


2. For a discussion of fashion and Benjamin’s historical method, see Ulrich Lehmann,
   ‘Tigersprung: Fashioning History’,Fashion Theory, vol. 3, issue 3, September 1999, pp. 297–


3.