‘Naught Couture.’

Photo by Simon Thorogood.

“Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness of art.”  

– Anselm Kiefer 

We have heard much about the decline of the high-street in recent times and corresponding disappearance of some big name retail and department stores from city centres. But can loss help us find something anew, and something that might, in some ways, have been ‘there’ all along? 

Places and Settings. 

The Covid pandemic has certainly accelerated a course of store and branch closures, with pending reduction of some flagship store space allied to a swift migration to online shopping.  

Many of these disappearing stores perhaps functioned as social barometers of a particular class, clientele, and time. They also sanctioned a very particular culture of ‘browsing,’ the wandering around floors and departments (sometimes purposefully, sometimes less so), amongst other shoppers and amid a range of arranged chattels and merchandise.  

Parallels between browsing in a store and wandering around a gallery, museum, or cathedral are clear and obvious, and certainly many high-end brands have long played with the notion of what a retail space can be, or what it can look like – the shop transmuted as gallery, shrine or church, for example.  

Absenteeism. 

But, as we consider any heightened status of a shop or outlet, and the things set within, we might correspondingly consider the idea of what is not there, or what is absent. Where shops tend to not deal with issues of absence, largely for commercial reasons, churches or temples certainly do. These often serve as mediums or sanctuaries that instruct us that ‘nothingness,’ and the abstraction and abdication of the physical artefact or setting, may be considered definitive in order to extend a reach and scope of existence.  

Such interpretation can prove both significant and intriguing for fashion. A confrontation with commodities or goods that are excised or progressively ‘not there’ might, in fact, prompt us to invest in approbatory cultures of reductionism. And, as part of such a developing dialogue we can appraise what happens during any process of removal or eradication. What are we removing exactly, and why? What happens to the thing or entity being removed? Where does it go; and what fills up the ‘space’ left behind by the something no longer there? 

The Presence of Fashion. 

Such investigation might pose the question if conventional cultures of objectification, materialism, and consumption can be commuted by constructs of thought or deliberation as output or ‘product?’ This idea could help focus and develop awareness (Heidegger’s ‘stimmung’) on what is left behind, unnoticed, or disregarded, and how such conditions may be cultivated for creative and commercial advantage. 

This point also connects to an earlier issue made about forging purposeful shifts away from conventional understandings of the ‘object-garment’ towards a conceptual (yet viable) perceptivity of the ‘idea-garment.’  

Considered research and exploration in this area may yield intriguing manifestations of a concentrated ‘presence of fashion.’ The idea of presence embraces absence and inessentiality, but is also concerned with the inconspicuous value of something that is ‘there,’ but where it has just not been noticed before.  

This idea can offer an intriguing opportunity for the further conceptualising of fashion (or any other manufactured product or service), but it also prevails as a commercially expedient framework for new markets that may go beyond current preoccupation with NFT’s or crypto-assets, for instance.  

If precipitous states of nothingness might induce distinct forms of creative complexity, new forms of categorisation should correspondingly arise. We may see the evolution of different types of association, juxtaposition or connection, different types of language, different types of outlet, different types of personnel, and different types of consumer. 

There And Not There. 

“If we wish for better, more ethical, more responsible and less materially orientated outlooks, we may need to acknowledge a need to not only slow down, but to fundamentally change our relationship with time and ownership.”

A concept of immateriality and inconsequentiality is something that has been extensively explored through philosophy or religion, for example, but it is has proved a rich vein of inspiration for the arts too, especially the Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A little earlier, in 1958, the experimental artist Brion Gyson developed his ‘Dreamachine’ light device that stimulated transcendental experiences in a viewer. Gyson described the work as “the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed,” and which reputedly allowed users to ‘see’ their brain’s own visual cortex. 

In 2022, an updated Dreamachine installation will be toured throughout the UK as part of the Unboxed festival. As part of this, Gyson’s original concept is being extended through an extensive collaboration with a neuroscientist, philosopher, art group, and a composer, that will allow audiences to engage in contemporary and collective transcendental encounters. 

The team behind Dreamachine state that their intention is to instruct new art audiences in alternative states of shared awareness and experience, where they might find ‘completion’ within themselves, rather than through any external condition.  

So, the Dreamachine, like many artworks and designed creative experiences of course, has consequence and influence because it asks us to question what value is, and where this might be found. But, the work also asks us to contemplate and invest in the ‘present,’ and in this very moment.  

This can be useful as fashion is frequently characterised as a commercially orientated system that sustains markets, audiences and consumers in their search and appetite for the ‘next.’ If we wish for better, more ethical, more responsible and less materially orientated outlooks, we may need to acknowledge a need to not only slow down, but to fundamentally change our relationship with time and ownership, as philosophy and religion have always advocated. The very operation of ‘listening’ to the here and now, then, can represent an important claim on the future. 

Returning to the theme of department stores, what was intriguing about them in their heyday, was that as well as being impressive ‘depositories of stuff,’ they offered a realm for losing oneself, and as place for illusion and dreaming. Within a rapidly changing retail landscape and marketplace, perhaps we are presented with a rare and brief occasion to radically re-evaluate what kind of setting or milieu we choose to ‘immerse’ and ‘dress’ ourselves within?  

If fashion needs to develop and reprise new ways for us to ‘browse,’ then there should be concerted emphasis for this to implicate philosophical estates, not real estates.