The Fashion Businessparticular twenty-one out of the thirty-three main attractions involved taking
a fantasy journey to ‘distant visions’.^11 The World Tour traversed the length
of an enormous circular canvas panorama representing, in the words of a
contemporary journalist, ‘without solution or continuity, Spain, Athens,
Constantinople, Suez, India, China and Japan... the Acropolis next door
to the Golden Horn and the Suez Canal almost bathing the Hindu forests’.^12
In front of each country ‘natives’ danced or charmed snakes before the
painting of their homeland. Having made the tour of the world, visitors to
the diorama could enjoy a simulated voyage to the moon. Voyagers in the
Cinéorama could make an imaginary journey in cinematic techniques to the
floor of the sea or up in a balloon, standing in a stationary basket while the
pictures moved before their eyes. The Maréorama reproduced a sea-voyage
from France to Constantinople and involved a canvas panorama, the smell
of salt air, gentle swaying motions and music from each of the regions visited.
A contemporary described the music ‘which takes on the colour of the country
at which the ship is calling; melancholy at departure, it... becomes Arabic
in Africa, and ends up Turkish after having been Venetian’.^13 At night visitors
to the 1900 exhibition could be dazzled by displays of electrically lit fountains
or watch the belly dancers in a reproduction of a Cairo night spot.
Dialectical imagesIn the nineteenth century it was through the spectacles and dreamy scenarios
staged in the department store that female consumption was nurtured, trained
and encouraged, as well as in the great exhibitions which granted a vision of
luxury consumption to a mass audience. Many of these visions have striking
parallels in the staging of Galliano’s shows in the 1990s, which drew on
illusion, drama and theatre for their effects. Just as in the nineteenth-century
‘reveries were passed off as reality’,^14 so Galliano’s Spring-Summer 1995
presentation, in which a photo studio was made over as a private set and
dressed with vintage cars against which the models posed as ‘divas’ from
1910 to the 1950s, ‘was like a dream and not a show’.^15 Galliano’s spectacular
- Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century
France, Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1982, p. 73. - Michel Corday, ‘À l’Éxposition - Visions lointaines’,Revue de Paris, 15 March 1900.
Quoted in ibid., p. 74. - Ibid., p. 75.
- Ibid., P. 65.
- Joseph Ettegui, owner of Joseph: from Videofashion News, vol. 19, no. 20, ‘Paris
Reflections’, Spring-Summer 1995.