Fashion, Ugliness, and Philosophy

This work is about the ugly. To be more precise, it is about the ugly show window that appears twice a year – during the seasonal sales of fashion when, strikingly enough, the visual economy of beauty is disrupted by the impact of the unsightly.

We will call this Dionysian period the “death of fashion”. Once the fashion collection of the past season is no longer in fashion, the period of the seasonal sales becomes the transitional phase between the old and the new collection. It seems to us as if documenting the ugly is a taboo today as merchandising literature is replete with images of the beautiful show windows.

But what about the ugly window? The one scene never found on ancient Greek vases is the solemn moment in which the victim is sacrificed ceremonially. Is the “death of fashion” only a rational act of selling out leftovers, or is it something more meaningful? The fashion industry has perfected the ways of introducing new commodities, presenting a new generation of aesthetically different products twice a year.

Catwalk shows in major fashion capitals stage these new collections in a ritualised way and the fashion industry organises and attends to the Apollonian festival during which the new collection is born. In contrast, the seasonal sale window is naked and instead of being clad in an expensive evening dress, the naked mannequin is merely clothed in packing paper.

Rather than using a distinctive graphic design, window dressers write by hand. How does fashion die in the show window? Is it a silent death, is it a murder, or is it a sacrifice? Whatever the case may be it is a high publicity event. The question lies somewhere between the production of fashion and its consumption.

The “death of fashion”, however, refers to the displayed garment and not to the garment worn, the seasonal sale being its last chapter and the end of a seasonal collection. We wanted to find out how this end is dramatised in the retail theatre. Do window dressers use any intuitive images? To what extent is the consumer involved in a ritualised “death of fashion”?

“In this visual flood of images, there is still hope for reviving the wild primal settings of the image. In a certain way, each image has preserved something wild and incredible, but intuition is capable of retrieving this “punctum”, this secret of the image, provided we take the image in its literal sense. And it is up to us to want this literalness, this secret; it is up to us to let it flow and put an end to this widespread aestheticisation, to this intellectual technology of culture.”

The creation of space where everyday behaviour can be reconsidered is an interesting point in the description of this ancient festival. Do we call into question the fact that we may have paid the double for a piece of garment had we bought it a day before the sales began? This, and the fact that with the upcoming collection the piece we buy during the sales will become a kind of taboo.

The fashion of the past will not be further discussed after the arrival of the new one, after all, fashion does not speak about the not fashionable. Rituals articulate conflicts and transform them into a symbolic practice. Barthes makes the verbal structures of the “written-garment” the object of his study.

According to him, the study of fashion magazines is the study of the representation of fashion, for Barthes distinguished between the “real garment” and the “represented garment”.

To follow this idea of the represented and the real we would also have to study the “real presentation” of fashion in the show window on the street. Barthes, on his part, discussed only the representational aspect of fashion in the fashion magazine. But purchase holds an equal position beside the fashion magazine, where the garments are displayed as “represented garments”.

The attempt to present the garments in a fetishistic way is easily identifiable in the beautiful window. But what about the ugly window? What lies behind this visual attack?

“The more it should be common sense to an enlightened art scene that the categories “beautiful” and “ugly” have become irrelevant for the attempts at raising aesthetic questions and finding solutions to them, the more they keep sneaking into the discourse through the back door of the commonplace, of fashion, advertising and the ideologies of design – like spectres of themselves.”

The philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann proposes that the category of the ugly has undergone considerable change, shifting from the arts into design, and so into our everyday life. If we follow this proposition, we could assume that the ugly has found its final abode in our seasonal sale window. It will, however, be worthwhile to look back at the arts and see what initial function the ugly had had.

In Umberto Eco’s historical analysis of beauty, we find that the aesthetic categories represented by the ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus coexist side by side, although the incursion of chaos disrupts the permanent state of beauty and harmony from time to time. In ancient Greek aesthetic economy, the cyclical appearance of the ugly was a stabilising factor. Will this be true of contemporary aesthetic economy of the high street as well?

The Dionysian rite is closely bound to myth; it is the myth of the dying god. James George Frazer draws a comparison between myth and rite in order to prove that ritual practice was the starting point for mythology.

The death of the god was, in a magical way, brought into relation to the awakening of flora. Here we find our way back to Barthes’ argument in which he relates the advent of the new spring collection to the awakening of nature. The corn god is sacrificed and, with his resurrection, nature is reborn in spring.

Since Nietzsche, an archaic sacrifice is seen as the origins of the performing arts. The orgiastic cult becomes the aesthetic opponent of beauty. Today, the new collection is presented on the catwalk. The runway presentation is, in its aesthetic representation, more related to the beautiful world of Apollo.

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