they are the true fairies of these arcades

G [Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville]

Yes, when all the world from Paris to China
Pays heed to your doctrine, O divine Saint-Simon,
The glorious Golden Age will be reborn.
Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea,
Sheep roasted whole will frisk on the plain,
And sautéed pike will swim in the seine.
Fricasseed spinach will grow on the ground,
Garnished with crushed fired croutons;
The trees will bring forth apple compotes,
And farmers will harvest boots and coats.
It will snow wine, it will rain chickens,
And ducks cooked with turnips will fall from the sky.

—Ferdinand Langlé and Emile Vanderburch, Louis-Bronzeet le Saint-Simonien: Parodie de Louis XI (Theatre du Palais-Royal,February 27, 1832)


Despondent Divorcee/Genesee Hotel Suicide
Photograph by I. Russell Sorgi, Buffalo Courier Express, 8 May 1942.

B [Fashion]
"Here fashion opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware--between carnal pleasure and the corpse...For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered between shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion"(Benjamin 62-63).

Z [The Doll, The Automaton]
"In a shop on the Rue Legendre, in Batingnolles, a whole series of female busts, without heads of legs, with curtain hooks in place of arms and a percaline skin of arbitrary hue--bean brown, glaring pink, hard black--are lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods, or set out on tables' J.-K. Huysmanss, Croquis parisiens (Paris, 1886)" (Benjamin 694).


Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century {Exposé of 1935}
"Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshiped...Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service" (Benjamin 8).