The Fashion BusinessJolted out of the context of the past, the dialectical image could be read in
the present as a ‘truth’. But it was not an absolute truth, rather a truth which
was fleeting and temporal, existing only at the moment of perception,
characterized by ‘shock’ or vivid recognition.^24 It was not that the past simply
illuminated the present, or that the present illuminated the past; rather, the
two images came together in a ‘critical constellation’, tracing a previously
concealed connection.^25 Benjamin identified some key figures – one might
say key tropes – of nineteenth-century Paris as ‘dialectical images’: the
prostitute, fashion itself, commodities, the arcades. It is as just such an image
that I now turn to the question of the coincidence of woman as spectacle
and modernity in this period.
Modernity and The Spectacle of WomenThe wholesale rebuilding of Paris in the second half of the century, in the
grand scheme concocted between Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann,
transformed it into the city we know today and allowed the development of
the ‘society of the spectacle’ which, I have tried to indicate, still resonates in
the imagery of the contemporary fashion show.^26 In the rebuilding of Paris
the old, medieval quartiers were broken up and replaced with wide boule-
vards, open spaces and parks. With industrialization came urbanization and
massively increased consumption. Paris became a city for the production
and sale of luxury goods, and its parks and squares became new sites of
- Ibid., pp. 185, 221, 250 & 290.
- Ibid., pp. 290–1.
- My use of the term ‘spectacle’ derives from Guy Debord’sThe Society of the Spectacle,
trans. Malcolm Imrie, London: Verso, 1888 (first published 1967) in which Debord argues
that everyday life is colonized by a new phase of commodity production. Debord, however,
situates this phase in the 1920s, whereas others locate it as far back as the court of Louis XIV:
Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France,
Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1982 and Jay, Martin,
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Los Angeles
& London, England: University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, p. 432. I have discussed
modernity in the context of nineteenth-century Paris, following both Walter Benjamin and,
more recently, Clark, T.J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his
Followers, London: Princeton UP, Princeton, & Thames & Hudson, 1984. Thomas Richards
provides a useful model of the application of Debord’s ideas to nineteenth-century Britain in
The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914, London
& New York: Verso, 1991. A very useful consideration of the convergence of spectacle and
modernity, in relation to late nineteenth-century woman, is Heather McPhearson’s ‘Sarah
Bernhardt: Portrait of the Actress as Spectacle’,Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 20, no. 4,
1999, pp. 409-54. Thanks to Carol Tulloch for bringing this invaluable article to my attention.