vienna

interesting aspect for our investigation. It has been observed that
during the sales the shop’s layout is often changed temporarily
to stage the off-sale items in a striking manner inside the store.
But the most significant change is to the entrance to the shop,
which is usually defined by the show window and can be interpreted
as a kind of symbolic door. Arnold van Gennep argues
that the architectural situation and especially doors are perceived
as strong symbolic elements in passage rites. Doors symbolise
transition, and rites of passage use doors to make changes
visible. 91 Making things visible is an important function of rituals,
which is why the materialisation of rituals plays an important
role in making things visible as well as in making social changes
traceable on the level of emotion and intuition. Materialisation
strategies use such intuitive images like the door for this level
of communication. When an initiate walks in through a door
during the ritual dramatisation, the ritual audience can emotionally
follow the change of social state. Although we go through
doors everyday, the door assumes a symbolic function because
of ritualisation. Decorating structured space is also a widespread
practice because decoration indicates that a space is ritualised.
The decoration privileges a space in relation to others and at
times even restricts access. All this can happen, but does not
necessarily have to happen. Bell explains it as follows:
“At best, ritualisation can be defined only as a ‘way of acting’
that makes distinctions like the foregoing ones by means of
culturally and situationally relevant categories and nuances.
When such culturally specific strategies are generalized into a
universal phenomenon, much of the logic by which these ritual
strategies do what they do is lost.” 92
For our analysis, this means that we should not to try to
apply categories “blindly”, but be aware of the nuances that
separate the ritualised show window from the everyday and
develop a discourse that emerges from a precise study of
the phenomenon. Certain culturally specific strategies do what
they do only because of the context, and we will not try to
universalise them. But if we follow Roland Barthes’ hypothesis,
we would have to see whether the same universal phenomenon
can be found in the advent of the new fashion collection and the
91 Gennep (1960:192).
92 Bell (1992:205).
The
Death
of
Fashion 35