John Galliano: Modernity and SpectacleFor Georg Simmel, the aesthetics of world exhibitions conferred a feeling
of presentness so that fashion’s intensified pace ‘increases our time-conscious-
ness, and our simultaneous pleasure in newness and oldness give us a strong
sense of presentness’.^19 It is this same sense of ‘presentness’ in a late twentieth-
century fashion show, with its brevity and drama (it lasts no more than thirty
minutes) that is created precisely through the mingling and telescoping of
historical themes and pastiches. Mike Featherstone argues that the writing
of both Simmel and Benjamin can
direct us towards the ways in which the urban landscape has become aestheticized
and enchanted through the architecture, billboards, shop displays, advertisements,
packages, street signs, and through the embodied persons who move through these
spaces: the individuals who wear... fashionable clothing, hairstyles and make-
up, or who move or hold their bodies in particular stylised ways’.^20This enchantment and stylization were replayed in the hyperreal space of
the late twentieth-century catwalk.
Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘every image of the past that is not recognized
by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’.^21
In contrasting these images of the late twentieth century with others from
the mid to late nineteenth, I have tried to construct a set of what Benjamin
called ‘dialectical images’, images which were not based on simple com-
parisons but which created a more complex historical relay of themes running
between past and present. For Benjamin, the relationship between images of
the past and the present worked like the montage technique of cinema.^22
The principle of montage is that a third meaning is created by the juxta-
position of two images, rather than any immutable meaning inhering in each
image. Benjamin conceived of this relationship as a dialectical one: the motifs
of the past and the present functioned as thesis and antithesis. The flash of
recognition, between past and present images, was the dialectical image that
transformed both.^23
- Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1991, p. 74. - Ibid., p. 76.
- Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,Illuminations, London: trans,
Harry Zohn, Fontana/Collins, 1973, p. 257. - 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, p. 250. - Ibid.