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LIVING ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE FUTURE INSTANT
3min of reading

If fashion lives exposed under lights as dazzling as that of the noonday sun, this overexposure can first and foremost be understood as a response to a concrete problem, that of visibility, of the maximal legibility of products and their images. But under these bright lights a deep night exists, only revealed to us by the flashes and floodlights. Just as we call the technique of shooting a nocturnal scene in broad daylight ‘day for night’, so for fashion images we could speak of ‘night for day’.

Fashion is as obscure as a magic trick, eluding reason. Hypnosis on a global scale, a louche, but ultra-efficient shamanism, a trade in identities, or their bricolage, it can be numbered among those pleasure industries whose deals usually take place in dark corners, at night fall. Except for the fact that it does not sell, in the form of powder or pill, the promise of altered states of consciousness: it offers, straightforwardly and completely legally, by way of shoes and coats, a reformulation of our image in the world, the dream of a daily rebirth. It sells the experience of another life, of another time within the everyday.

When night comes, the outline of duty blurs and reason slumbers, the world darkens and becomes another - not entirely its opposite, but its morals relaxed - a time consecrated to intoxication and love, when witches’ sabbaths and crimes take place, when the most fantastic festivities are held, when all the pleasure that is too much to be tolerated in daylight is seized.

On the uncertain alleys down which fashion leads us, blind but enchanting, time also stops, or at least transforms. Something is frozen, movement forward is only a flicker, a swaying: we no longer walk, we dance. Because the hours struck on fashion’s clock are always ambiguous: neither today not tomorrow - neither here nor there - they fuse opposites, like a dark night ceaselessly illuminated by the light of fireworks. Fashion moves forward whilst looking back, more often than not, magnetized by two opposite poles, nostalgia and anticipation. Obsessed with the future, fashion nonetheless speaks, obsessively, in dead tongues: its eclipses and rebirths are only ever new bridges erected between other pasts and other futures, rewritings of that which has been, weaving a pattern and revealing correspondences between extinct worlds and those to come. Often, its most perfect present is nothing other than a precise balance between moving forward and lingering behind.

Fashion always lives at the stroke of midnight, which is not only the hour of deepest shadow and its licence, but poised precariously between the present - already almost past - and the future. The moment when the body relaxes is also that when the passage of time, the volatility of days, is most keenly felt. An in-between moment, a threshold, an instant of hesitation on the way, midnight is made of the most fragile material, that which endures only a second, disappearing as soon as it comes into being, a spark. Midnight, like fashion, does not exist in itself, but only as the medium of a metamorphosis, above all a living force, with the power, whatever the cost, to propel today towards tomorrow.

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