John Galliano: Modernity and Spectacleence they also echo a certain nineteenth-century ambivalence about women,
commodities and consumption.^42
This ambivalence spilled out in the avant-garde painting of the time. In
paintings of the femme fatale of the period, the Salomés and Judiths of the
Decadence, where the image of desire was tinged with dread, the spectacular
displays of consumer capitalism were transposed from the world of goods to
the woman herself. Colin McDowell has suggested that Galliano’s work from
the mid-1990s exhibited the same ambivalence in his projection of a libidinous
female image, ‘bringing echoes of hookers, geishas, hostesses in opium dens’.^43
In this context, his fascination with spectacular historical figures of the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries echoes the ambivalence of that
period. His couture collection for Dior Autumn-Winter 1997 reconfigured
the belle époque and, specifically, Colette as a showgirl. His own label
collection for Autumn-Winter 1998 referred to the vampish and ambiguous
sexuality of German cabaret in the Weimar period. These shows evoked pre-
war Paris as a city of spectacle and luxury, and post-war Berlin as a city of
modernist experimentation and decadence. Whether his references were to
real historical figures or images from cinema and art, his particular fascination
with women who used their sexuality spectacularly to make their way in the
world harked back to the ambiguous relation of sexuality, commerce and
fashion in the modernist period.
Modernity into PostmodernityThere are many competing usages of the terms modernity, modernization
and modernism, particularly between the social sciences and the humanities
traditions. A number of historians, for whom the idea of modernity is bound
up with an analysis of industrial capitalist society as a form of rupture from
- Nava, Mica, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’ in
Pasi Falk & Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 81. Yet he also suggests fashion can be emblematic of
social change: Buck-Morss, Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin
and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass. & London , England: MIT Press, 1989. References
in this article are to the paperback edition, 1991, pp. 101. There is a discussion of his
ambivalence in Jane Gaines & Charlotte Herzog (eds), Fabrications: Costume and the Female
Body, New York and London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 1–27. - McDowell, Colin, Galliano,London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, pp. 117. ‘John,
we are told, loves women, but it is not easy to avoid the thought that, within that love lurks a
fear which must be laid to rest by pastiche or, even more compelling, the suspicion that it is a
love so intense it also encompasses a degree of hatred.’