“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.”
Baudrillard (1999:36)
In this article I want to talk about the ugly. To be more precise, I want to talk 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”? We decided to do a ‘visual’ research in four major European cities during the sales period in order to acquire basic material, which could subsequently be used to analyse the dramatisation and to discover its underlying patterns. We also wanted to know whether we could find instructions for dressing the seasonal sale window. Are there any illustrations in professional magazines? Do books on “the art of window dressing” deal with the seasonal sale window, or is this not an art form? We not only wanted to involve literature on the aesthetics of the show window, but also literature that helps understand the ritual and performative dimension of dramatisation. Alongside literature dealing with the ritual dimension of consumer behaviour, we also involved literature on ritualisation in design and marketing in order to understand whether marketing or merchandising deal consciously with the designing of rituals.
This article aims to base its discourse on the research of intuitive images and meaningful actions; it is a search for hidden mythologies and the reinterpretation of such ancient social practices as rituals. It is also a kind of “poetic analysis” of our contemporary condition. Jean Baudrillard wrote that the presentation of commodities is not in itself convincing, but it is a necessary precondition for rationalising the act of buying. Mary Douglas, on the other hand, pointed out that the general assumption that “shopping is a fully rational activity” has been rejected by consumer theory which discovered “utterly implausible limitations on that rationality”. The “death of fashion” is a balance between the rationalisation of the act of buying and irrational basic emotions related to the system of fashion. Our interest in the following chapters lies in a careful excavation of stimulating dramatisations.
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Christmas was over when we opened the daily newspaper and found an advertisement for the winter sale in the boutique of an Italian fashion brand. Fashion brands do normally advertise in fashion magazines, but in a way, this advertisement was like a death announcement in daily papers. All it said was “Sale”, and the address of the fashion boutique in the first district of Vienna, which was printed in bold white on a black background.
So, we set out to take a look at the city’s storefronts and their decoration, finding them all surprisingly ugly. The sales period was omnipresent, and all the shops in town were decorated in a strikingly ugly manner. Why did this period ask for ugliness and not beauty? The books we found on window decoration only showed the nice, the well-designed and “artistic” show window.
Beautiful windows, like theatre stages presented the merchandise we were supposed to buy. It can be argued that the fashion business holds an exceptional place in the decoration business. The number of fashion show windows is generally over-emphasized in these lavishly illustrated books, which do not focus on fashion design alone.
In reality, the show windows are not all like the ones we find in these expensive publications. But they are usually done up in a nice way, according to the store’s budget. However, this changes dramatically during the sales period. All the stores compete in being uglier than the one next door. What is behind this period that recurs twice a year? The sales period lasts several weeks and takes place before the new spring/summer and autumn/winter fashion collections are launched. Roland Barthes analysed the phenomenon of fashion in great depth in the context of the “language of fashion” used by fashion editors in the fashion magazines of 1958/59. Exceptionally striking in this ‘mathematical’ discourse is a passage, which describes the change of fashion in spring. The advent of the new collection is compared with ancient Greek festivals like those of the god Dionysus. This text passage will not be highlighted initially8, but we will later develop it in a new way.
“[…] as a season, spring is both pure and mythical at once; mythical, by virtue of the awakening of nature; Fashion takes this awakening for its own, thus giving the readers, if not its buyers, the opportunity to participate annually in a myth that has come from the beginning of time; spring Fashion, for the modern woman, is like what the Great Dyonysia or the Anthesteria were for the ancient Greeks.”
Barthes did not further develop his idea of the Dionysus myth and the intense experiences of such dramatisations in ancient Greece. In order to also remain metaphorical, this passage is the part left unprotected by the armour of his structural analysis. We will, however, take it as an inspiration to further investigate this trail. Friedrich Nietzsche placed the birth of tragedy in relation to the Greek Dionysian cult.
“In all corners of the ancient world – to leave the modern one to oneside here – from Rome to Babylon, we can prove the existence of Dionysian festivities, whose type is at best related to the Greek type as the bearded satyr to whom the goat lent its name and attributes, is to Dionysus himself.”
The striking parallel to Barthes´ text lies in the fact that Nietzsche also addresses the likelihood of a continuing existence of the Dionysus cult. Nietzsche was also the one to place the nature of the cult in relation to Greek aesthetics. The desire for beauty in the form of celebrations, feasts and new cults contrasts with the desire for ugliness, an ugliness in the form of desire for pain, pessimism, tragic myth, the image of the horrifying, annihilating, ambiguous, and evil aspects of existence. The Dionysus cult stands for all these aspects of the ugly. The world of Dionysus also represents the perception of reality in a fuddled state in which the individual is annihilated in a mystic experience.
The antagonist here is the god Apollo, whose world is one of images, of fantasy and of creative force, which indicates that we may well be on the right path. If the ancient Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo represent both ugliness and beauty, the show window would normally belong to the world of Apollo. Although the two worlds are full of fantasy and colour, it seems that Dionysus is the driving force behind the design during the sales.
The show window is dressed with six mannequins. The mannequins are packed like corpses in plastic bags tied with a black plastic rope. They are not lying on the ground waiting for burial after the catastrophe but are in an upright position, maybe to be better seen from the street. A shopping bag with the inscription “3 DWAZE DAGEN” is mounted onto each of the six packaged corpses. The number three is figuratively displayed as a packed three-dimensional object, in the same way as the mannequins are. The floor of the show window is ‘undressed’, its beige stone visible through the transparent base. The backdrop is covered with wallpaper, which displays a graphic element that could be interpreted as a drop of water. This graphic element covers the entire backdrop. Hundreds of drops outlined with yellow form a regular pattern on the blue-green ground, creating the impression of rainfall. A bold black arrow on a yellow ground above the mannequins directs our gaze to the left side.
This striking window is located in Rotterdam. The department store’s “crazy incredible bargains” are on offer for three days. A strange coincidence that the Dionysus cult held on the Acropolis in Athens also lasted three days. Graf describes the ancient Greek festival in the following words:
“Dionysus was a god who came from outside and temporarily suspended the activities of everyday life. His festival created a space outside the day-to-day reality of the polis. The actors put aside their own identities, donning masks, high boots (kothornoi), and colourful costumes. Even the walk to the theatre of Dionysus, situated as it was on the slope between the homes of the Athenians and the citadel of their gods, removed them, for three days, from their familiar surroundings. This carnivalesque setting, this ‘carnival time’ gave them an opportunity to reflect critically on, and to call into question, all that was familiar to them: the polis, the people, the gods. At the same time, it fostered in them a sense of solidarity, which rendered such reflection and questioning tolerable. From this perspective, the festival of Dionysus seems the ideal occasion for the performance of tragedies.”
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. Nietzsche spoke about the necessity of sacrificing to both gods. The two sacrificial sites in the process of transformation from one trend to the next are perhaps the fashion show and the show window during the sales. In this way, we can detect the tension between beauty and ugliness in the show window throughout the fashion year, with the two incursions of ugliness during the sales periods.
When we focus our attention on the sales period only, we find the ugly sales window on the one hand, and the presence of the catwalk presentations in the fashion magazines on the other. We therefore see the balance of beauty and ugliness in different time scales. The dream of new garments on the catwalk stands in contrast to the reality of the tragic myth of the old fashion in the seasonal sale windows. The surprising fact that the ugly show window is not really documented can be explained by the claim that each epoch has its own forbidden zones of knowledge. This forbidden zone, especially in the case of literature on show windows and fashion theory in general, will be the subject of our further research.