vienna

the spectator and her eyes were closed, so she could be either dead
or asleep.
The window bore all elements of a typical seasonal sale window.
Colette had reversed the logic of the commodity world once again,
dramatising the introduction of the new collection as its death. As we
have already shown, documentation of the idea of staging the seasonal
sale with discarded pieces exists from various times before. 470 Colette
performed the retail drama in an artistic manner, and she also found
a poetic interpretation for the “life” of the mannequin. 471 Clothing
played a central role in this performance, and there were references
to Surrealism as well. Elizabeth Wilson reflects on Fashion and
Surrealism by focussing on the fetish:
“For Breton and the surrealists the fetish bore a relationship to their
concept of the Marvellous. The Marvellous came about as the
marriage of what they called convulsive beauty and objective chance.
These chance encounters, unexpected places and found objects all
exemplified the Marvellous. Their accidental occurrence or the
unexpected manner in which the surrealists became conscious
of them invested them with the same sort of magical meaning as
had been attributed to the fetish. In fact, the found object was very
similar to fetish”. 472
This concept runs counter to the production of the commodity
fetish and the representation of beauty. It is the counter world that
also breathes life into the seasonal sale window. The surrealists would
have adored the accidental beauty in them. Unfortunately, the relation
between fashion and art cannot be discussed in detail here. We will,
therefore, only give a short description of a possible way of drawing a
border between them. According to Rainer Metzger:
“The difference between art and fashion is not that one is additive
and seasonal and the other cumulative and organised along fixed
margins, which were the explanations put forth by modernism and
particularly by Walter Benjamin, the postmodern explanation is that
fashion is different from art because fashion is dependent on worldwide
currency in order to reach the small lives of those who feel
obliged to follow it, whereas art focuses on the marginal, incidental
470 See Austerlitz (1904:89) and Anonym (1957:35).
471 See also Benjamin (2004:693-697) on the “fairy-like” appearance of the mannequin.
472 Wilson (2004:381).
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