a fashion show

The etymology of the word “glamour” comes from a variant of Scottish gramarye "magic, enchantment, spell," in a medieval sense of "any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning" from 1720. (http://www.etymonline.com/) and that is certainly what a fashion show is – a form of commercial seduction. According to Guy Debord, the fashion show is a self-absorbed “spectacle unto itself… sealed in the show space of the runway, with its attendant protocols and hierarchies. Like the spectacle, it spatialises time and destroys memory.” (Debord, 193) It is also, on a more practical level, to attract press coverage and fulfil the commercial realities of a design house. Because although there is a lot of media coverage of this field, its actual economic force is relatively meagre. Its significance lies in the fact that it’s “symbolically central, although economically peripheral” (Evans, 294). There is a cultural impact that these shows carry that filter to the masses. As Thomas Richards wrote, the fashion show is about allurement and advertisement: “the theatre through which capitalism acts” (Richards, 251). Worth and Poiret, pioneers in the haute couture world, often hid their commercial realities of their businesses behind justifications of artistry of the contemporary fashion show. (Duggan, 243-70)

Now, more than ever, the fashion garment circulates not as the object but as the image, meaning that the image has become the commodity itself. Due to increasingly visualised media outlets, the priority is to have the most graphic runway images transmitted via print for global audiences.

'Viktor & Rolf on strike' posters. Autumn-Winter 1996-7

But as Viktor & Rolf’s collections seem to parody this knowledge, it also realizes that resistance to the spectacle does not come easily, nor is there a dire need to resist at all.