fashion and death

8/9/2019 Fashion and Death

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In the last ten years or so I have grown to loathe the increasingly incestuous relationsbetween Fashion, Advertising and Art. Although these relations have always in the pastinduced some astonishing cross-fertilizations more recently the entanglement hasbecome increasingly unthinking and squalid. All have pretensions to be each other andthus become the same and working to the same end the selling of tawdry dreams forcapital gain. I have included in full a text by the 19th century poet and philosopher

Giacomo Leopardi. It speaks across time with great, playful and severe resonances ofthe so-called zeitgeist, that is our culture of self-regard.

DIALOGUE BETWEEN FASHION AND DEATHGiacomo Leopardi

Fashion: Madame Death, Madame Death!

Death: Wait until your time comes, and then I will appear without being called by you.

Fashion: Madame Death!

Death: Go to the devil! I will come when you least expect me.

Fashion: As if I were not immortal!

Death: Immortal! Already has passed the thousandth year, since the age of immortals

ended.

Fashion: Madame is as much a Petrarchist as if she were an Italian poet of the fifteenth or

eighteenth century.

Death: I like Petrarch because he composed my triumph and because he refers so often to

me. But I must be moving.


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Fashion: Stay! For the love of the seven cardinal sins, stop a moment and look at me.

Death: Well I am looking.

Fashion: Do you not recognise me?

Death: You must know that I have bad sight and am without spectacles. The English make

none to suit me; and if they did, I should not know where to put them.

Fashion: I am Fashion, your sister.

Death: My sister?

Fashion: Yes. Do you not remember that we are both born of Decay?

Death: As if I, who am the chief enemy of memory should recollect it?

Fashion: But I do. I know also that we both equally profit by incessant change and

destruction of things here below, although you do so one way, and I in another.

Death: Unless you are speaking to yourself, or to someone inside your throat, raise yourvoice and pronounce your words more distinctly. If you go mumbling between your teeth

with that thin spider-voice of yours, I shall never understand you: because you ought to

know my hearing serves me no better than my sight.


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Fashion: Although it be contrary to custom, for in France they do not speak to be heard,

yet since we are sisters, I will speak as you wish, for we can dispense with ceremony

between ourselves. I say then that our common nature and custom is to incessantly renewthe world. You attack the life of man and overthrow all people and nations from beginning

to end; whereas I content myself for the most part with influencing beards, headdresses,

costumes, furniture, houses, and the like. It is true, I do some things comparable to yoursupreme action. I pierce ears, lips. And noses, and cause them to be torn by the ornaments

I suspend from them. I impress mens skin with hot iron stamps, under the pretence ofadornment. I compress the heads of children with tight bandages and other contrivances;

and make it customary for all men of a country to have heads of the same shape, as inparts of America and Asia.

I torture and cripple people with small shoes. I stifle women with stays so tight, that theireyes start from their heads; and I play a thousand similar ranks. I also frequently persuade

and force men of refinement to bear numberless fatigues and discomforts, and often real

sufferings; and some even die gloriously for love of me. I will say nothing of theheadaches, colds and inflammations of all kinds, fevers daily, tertian, and quatran

which men gain by their obedience to me. They are content to shiver with cold, or melt with

heat, simply because it is my will that they cover their shoulders with wool, and their

breasts with cotton. In fact, they do everything in my way, regardless of their own injury.


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gallop, and standing still, which paralyses you, is death to me. So let us run, and we will

chat as we go along.

Death: So be it then. Since your mother was mine you ought to serve me in some way, and

assist me in my business.

Fashion: I have already done so more than you can imagine. Above all, I, who annul

and transform other customs unceasingly, have nowhere changed the custom of death; for

this reason it has prevailed from the beginning of the world until now.

Death: A great miracle forsooth, that you have never done what you could not do!

Fashion: Why cannot I do it? You show how ignorant you are of the power of Fashion.

Death: Well, well: time enough to talk of this when you introduce the custom of not dying.

But at present, I want you, like a good sister, to aid me in rendering my task more easy and

expeditious that it has hitherto been.

Fashion: I have already mentioned some of my labours which are a source of profit to

you. But they are trifling in comparison with those which I will now tell you. Little by little,and especially in modern times, I have brought into disuse and discredit those exertions

and exercises which promote bodily health; and have substituted numberless others which

enfeeble the body in a thousand ways and shorten life. Besides I have introduced customsand manners, which render existence a thing more dead than alive, whether regarded from

a physical or mental point of view; so that this century may be aptly termed as the century

of death. And whereas formerly you had no possessions other than graves and vaults,where you sowed bones and dust, which are but a barren seed, now you have fine landed

properties, and people who are a sort of freehold possession of yours as soon as they are

born, though not then claimed by you. And more, you, who used, formerly to be hated andvituperated, are in the present day, thanks to me, valued and lauded by all men of genius.


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Such a one prefers you to life itself, and holds you in such high esteem that he invokes you,

and looks to you as his greatest hope.

But this is not all. I perceived that men had some vague idea of an after-life, which they

called immortality. They imagined they lived in the memory of their fellows, and this

remembrance they sought after eagerly. Of course this was in reality mere fancy, sincewhat could it matter to them when dead, that they lived in the mind of men? As well might

they dread contamination in the grave! Yet fearing lest this chimera might be prejudicial to


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you in seeming to diminish your honour and reputation, I have abolished the fashion of

seeking immortality, and its concession, even when merited. So that now, whoever dies may

assure himself that he is dead altogether, and every bit of him goesThese important things my love for you have prompted me to effect. I have also succeeded

in my endeavour to increase your power on earth. I am more than ever desirous of

continuing this work. Indeed, my object in seeking you today was to make a proposal thatfor the future we should not separate, but jointly might scheme and execute for the

furtherance of our respective designs.

Death: You speak reasonably, and I am willing to do as you propose.

fashion and death

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