vienna

Nobody has yet thought about how our soul responds to the seasonal
sale and its dramatisation of the ugly. The ugly, or Dionysian aesthetics interrupts
our profane consumer life in the retail churches. The sacred appears within the
context of the everyday. It is created by means of desacralisation, by using what
is poor und ugly. Sacred places are not created with money, but with ritual, or
ritual-like action and the use of key symbols:
“If we were to try to pin down the exact nature of the sacrality evoked in such
symbols, we would find a type of circularity by which sacredness, when not
explicitly a religious claim to divinity, is a quality of specialness, not the same as
other things, standing for something important and possessing an extra meaningfulness
and the ability to evoke emotion-filled images and experiences.” 314
We find this specialness in the decoration of the seasonal sale window in
comparison with that of the windows for the new collection. And the sacredness
of the seasonal sale is not limited to the retail temples, it is celebrated everywhere,
from the flagship store to the smallest fashion boutique. Ritual action and
the process of creating meaning are not dependent on money. A stone circle
can define a holy place equally well. The next shop we pass by uses the same
theme as the first shop in the street:
The façade has two show windows and two smaller showcases. In the window
are a huge poster and three mannequins. The mannequins are dressed in winter
garments: anorak, coat, jacket, trousers and warm pullover. The poster shows
a smiling woman with black hair. She is wearing the same trousers as the
mannequins, but her upper body is naked. She has covered her breasts with a
white board. On this white board is written: “– 50%”. A smaller version of this
image is used as a price tag on the exhibited goods, but it is significantly larger
than the usual size of a price tag. Instead of the reduction in percentage, we
can read the price of each item on the board covering the nakedness of the
model. The price tag is also used in the smaller vitrines where the lingerie is
presented on torsos.
In our culture, public nakedness is nothing extraordinary. We are confronted
with it on magazine covers as well as various other media. We do not usually
find it in the show windows of fashion boutiques during the year because fashion
posters try to stimulate customers to buy things by presenting the garments with
pleasing fashion photography. During the sales, however, there is a kind of taboo
about using conventional fetish strategies of window dressing to present the
dying collection. This is why the model in the above window has to be photo-
314 Bell (1997:157).
Mariahilfer Straße
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