John Galliano: Modernity and SpectacleYet, for all the similarities, there are also some fundamental differences
related precisely to changes in technology around the image which have
transformed modern fashion, including the marketing of Dior and Galliano,
despite their nostalgic evocations of the past. It is the paramount and altered
role of the image in contemporary culture, and particularly in fashion, which
differentiates Galliano’s practice from his nineteenth-century referents,
however insistently he harks back to them in his design motifs. Whereas
historically the imagery of fashion was an adjunct to fashionable dress,
increasingly the relationship of the two shifted, so that fashion began to
function equally as image and object, nowhere more so than in the spectacular
fashion shows staged in London and then Paris in the 1990s. Only a very
small number of people experienced the old-fashioned intimacy of a Galliano
show, seated close enough to the models to see the fine detailing of the clothes,
like the original Dior customers in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet many more
people became familiar with the 1990s collections than in the 1950s, as these
designs were increasingly conveyed to a mass audience through the new visual
media: magazines, books and videos, on the television and on the Internet.
An haute couture collection which would not appear in the shops, such as
John Galliano’s collections for Dior, or Alexander McQueen’s for Givenchy,
would almost certainly only be experienced through images. Susan Sontag
has argued that in the modern period our perception of reality is shaped by
the type and frequency of images we receive. Sontag writes that from the
mid-nineteenth century ‘the credence that could no longer be given to realities
understoodin the form of images was now being given to realities understood
to be images, illusions’, and goes on to cite Feurebach’s observation of 1843,
also cited by Debord at the beginning of The Society of the Spectacle: ‘our
era prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation
to the reality, appearance to being’.^57
But if the new technologies have altered our access to image and meaning,
nevertheless many of the techniques of the image, in retailing and marketing,
remind us of their origins in nineteenth-century Paris. In this there is an
ambiguity. The new emphasis on the image contains within it the trace of
the past. A feathered and sequined evening flapper dress by Galliano for
Dior does not merely gesture stylistically towards the past but conceals deeper,
- Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 153. For
more empirically-based studies of the impact of new visual technologies on sensibilities, see:
Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-
Century, Cambridge Mass & London England: MIT Press, 1990; McQuire Scott, Visions of
Modernity: Representaion, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, Thousand
Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, London, 1998.