vienna

was that there are no merchandising guidelines for this staging.
It seems that it belongs to the forbidden knowledge of merchandising.
This taboo is also respected in literature on the show
window. We only found images of beautiful show windows. The
reason for this taboo could lie in the fact that more or less all the
good counsel about dressing a window is reversed during
the sales. While turning the window into a stockroom during the
year is not appropriate, it becomes the favourite strategy in the
sales period. The show window as the sacral space of the fetish
object is desacralised during the sales. There are two major strategies
for dramatising the sale. We can call the first one “the dead
mannequin” and the second one “the dead shop”. The “dead
mannequin” summarises all the ways of decoration which,
according to Victor Turner, represent a state of “betwixed and
between”. 638 Examples are the exposure of naked mannequins,
mannequins dressed in packing paper, or the total removal of
the mannequin during the sales. 639 The second strategy is the
“dead shop”. The “dead shop” echoes the way show windows
are dressed in the phase of abandonment or in the phase of redressing
and transformation 640 Packing paper covers the window
in such a way that it is impossible to get a view of the shop’s
empty interior. This is also a violation of merchandising rules.
The consumer’s view is obstructed and the information behind
the transparent show window remains concealed. Several other
phenomena can be subsumed under Turner’s “communitas”.
Differences in everyday life are made equal during the transition
phase of the passage rite. We observed that the individuality
of the brands was not visible during the sales; Dionysian
dramatisation makes it impossible to distinguish between the
brands. Besides, there was often no distinction between
couture shops and cheap mass-market shops. Although a few
couture shops dramatised the sale in an artistic way, it was
always a staging of the Dionysian. While shops invest a lot of
money during the year, the show windows are mostly decorated
with extremely cheap materials during the sales, bringing out
the cheapness of the ware very distinctly. The seasonal sale
window is the window “without” decoration. Naked are not
only the mannequins, but also the interior of the show window.
638 Turner (1997:95).
639 We have chosen the artist Colette and her performance in a show window in New York as a prototype for this form of
representation.
640 Christo’s “store fronts” are a prototype for this category. In a conversation with him, Christo made it explicitly clear to me
that he does not desire associations with an abandoned show window, for there is something going on behind the covered
window.
The Death of Fashion
264