John Galliano: Modernity and Spectaclefashioning and of novelty and artifice. This double-sided quality also, and
specifically, characterizes the spectacle of women in the modernist period.
InThe Painter of Modern Life Charles Baudelaire defined the experience
of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the
contingent’.^49 These ideas were later developed in Georg Simmel’s discussion
of ‘neurasthenia’ and Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘shock’. Simmel related
fashion to the fragmentation of modern life and discussed its neurasthenia,
that is, the overstimulation and nervous excitement which came with the
growth of the metropolis. He associated fashion with the middle classes and
with the city, as well as with the stylization of everyday objects (for him the
Jugendstil movement in Germany) and he pointed to a close relation between
art, fashion and consumer culture, a connection which became topical again
in the 1990s. Benjamin’s concept of shock also related to Baudelaire’s
modernité in his descriptions of life in Baudelaire’s Paris – for Benjamin the
ur-city of modernity – as being characterized by ‘shocks, jolts and vivid
presentness captured by the break with traditional forms of sociation’.^50
Again, one could point to present-day similarities in the changing social
patterns of work, leisure and the family in the late twentieth century. The
so-called weakening of the family structure was a feature of nineteenth-
century Paris too, when populations drifted to the cities in huge numbers.
Both Simmel and Benjamin imply the idea of rupture with the past, a sense
which could also be said to have characterized the last twenty years of the
twentieth century. Hal Foster suggests that today Baudelaire’s ‘shock’ has
become electronic; he writes that we are wiredto spectacular events and
‘psycho-techno thrills’.^51 The question raised in Hal Foster’s observation is
whether our electronic shock is radically different from Benjamin’s, or whether
traces of the past still echo in the present.^52 Whereas Baudelaire, Simmel
and Benjamin wrote about the effects of industrialization on urban popula-
tions, the late twentieth century has been characterized, rather, by an
information revolution which started thirty years ago with the first satellites
- Baudelaire, Charles, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’,The Painter of Modern Life and
Other Essays, London : trans. Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press, 1964, p. 12. - Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1991, p. 65. - Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century,
Cambridge Mass & London England: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 221–2. - Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1991, argues that postmodernism is a continuation of modernity,
and that is why the writing of Simmel and Benjamin still resonate in the present: see his chapter
5, ‘the Aestheticization of Everyday Life’, pp. 65–82.