vienna

of the show window, the interaction takes place between the
window dresser, as the person responsible for the materialisation
of the seasonal sale animation, and the passer-by, who is the
recipient of the message transmitted through the medium of the
decorated window. This one-way communication is no hindrance
in relating our case to ritual constructions in general. Maybe the
attitudes of the shoppers change as well, and this would be an
important argument for the indication of a ritual construction in
studies more focused on the human interaction than on the aspect
of materialisation. 66 If we transfer the argument of not doing
what each of us would like to do to the design of the seasonal
sale window, it would prompt the window designer to follow an
aesthetic plan that is not in keeping with his individual ideas. The
window dresser would no longer express his individual ideas
but would merely pretend to design. We will take this argument
as a hypothesis and make a note of it for our discussion. If we
speak of the seasonal sale as a ritual, we will find that it does
not provide any instructions for acting that are not motivated
by the actors themselves. Ritual attitude accepts that we are
not ourselves the authors of what we are doing, 67 a strange
perspective of the creative people involved in the process of
merchandising. 68 Another widely shared argument is that rituals
have a transitional function. 69 This criterion also marks out the
ceremony, which has some formal criteria in common with the
ritual. While rituals transform, ceremonies have the function to
indicate. 70 The fashion year is basically divided into two seasons.
In terms of time, the seasonal sale is a transition between the
seasons when shops stop selling the past fashion and want to
get rid of their stock and the arrival of the new collection. As the
event takes place at the same time every year, traditional ritual
studies could call it a calendar rite. 71 Consumer culture has constructed
a method of structuring time in a society less and less
orientated to nature but to the consumption of consumer goods.
It is no longer nature that structures our year, but the nature
of the production of fashion items. Roland Barthes argued that
when we look at special categories of fashion items we can see
that they transform from one season to the next:
66 Humphrey/Laidlaw (1994:97) emphasise the importance of the ritual attitude of the persons involved in rituals.
67 Humphrey/Laidlaw (1994:98).
68 Especially in a creative world full of star authors.
69 Wiedenmann (1991:14).
70 Turner (1982:80).
71 Calendar rites have the important social function of structuring time, whereby they also stablise our perception of time. It is
not our aim to categorise our case study in this way.
The
Death
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