John Galliano: Modernity and Spectaclerunway shows, simultaneously enticement and advertisement, were highly
innovative, but the link between spectacle and commodity culture was first
made in the nineteenth century. In his designs, Galliano piled up cultural
references like the goods on display in nineteenth-century Parisian department
stores and world fares, evoking Paris’s reputation as a city of luxury goods
in the luxury of his contemporary designs. Émile Zola’s novel about a Paris
department store in the 1860s, The Ladies’ Paradise, describes a window
display of female dummies dressed in the most sumptuous and elaborate
fashion which suggests the textiles used by Galliano in his designs for Dior –
snowfalls of costly lace, velvet rimmed with fox fur, silk with Siberian squirrel,
cashmere and cocks’ feathers, quilting, swansdown and chenille.^16
The rest rooms and roof gardens of nineteenth-century department stores,
fitted with pergolas, zoos and ice rinks, strikingly resemble some Galliano
show settings. Department stores were fantasy palaces through which the
customers moved. The modern fashion show fulfils something of the same
role, with the difference that the audience remains seated while the spectacle
unfolds before them like a panorama. Perhaps the show itself, in which the
stationary spectator is dazzled by lights, effects and rapid-fire presentation,
has more in common with the fantasy journeys of the world fairs. In the
spectacles of the 1900 exhibition colours, cultures and sounds were fused in
a way very similar to the design fusions of a Galliano show; the ‘Cairo belly-
dancers’ and ‘Andalusian gypsies’ of the world fair are not dissimilar to
Galliano’s performing models. The piling up of historical and cross-cultural
references in a Galliano collection differ only in specific detail, rather than
general effect, for his techniques of historical pastiche and cultural collage
fuse disparate cultures and places, much as the World Tour did in the 1900
Paris Universal Exhibition by abutting a Hindu pagoda, a Chinese temple
and a Muslim mosque, enlivened by live jugglers and geishas.^17 And the
effect both of a Galliano show and of the displays in the 1900 exhibition is
to normalize, contain and manage non-European cultures through the very
process of creating them as spectacle.
The 1900 exhibition had been the first to feature contemporary fashion,
brightly lit by electricity, in glass cages containing couturier-clad wax
dummies. In the ‘Pavillon de la Mode’ were displayed thirty examples of the
history of costume, including the Empress Theodora on her throne, Queen
Isabelle of Bavaria waiting in a tournament, the Field of the Cloth of Gold,
- Émile Zola, The Ladies Paradise, trans. with an introduction by Nelson, Brian, Oxford
& New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 6. - Jullian, Philippe, The Triumph of Art Nouveau: the Paris Exhibition of 1900, London:
Phaidon Press, 1974, p. 169.