to accompany and optimize commercial strategies and mediations.
In 1999, the Dior brand launched one of its most emblematic products. It was the perfume J’adore, a product with an undeniable commercial success10 and whose name contributes to the brand’s communication and symbolic positioning. While the advertising campaign designed for this product has always introduced Christian intertexts11, the product name, having gradually become a brand signature, further deployed a sacred dimension that would be unique to Dior: “J’adore Dior” had become a recurring statement in many of the brand’s communication strategies and, as a result, the statement implied the worship dimension that Dior was acquiring. As for the formula (Krieg-Planque 2009) “J’adore Dior”, in 2016 it underwent a syntactic transformation and gave rise to a portmanteau word that can be described as a neologism: j’adior, a contraction of J’adore and Dior. Since that year, this example of linguistic creativity, as well as communication and marketing creativity, has been applied to the brand’s products: shoes, T-shirts and caps. The sacralization of the fashion brand was once again presented as a long-term strategy to shift the commercial dimension of the company in question.
Finally, the Italian brand Miu Miu, a member of the Prada group, which also specializes in luxury ready-to-wear fashion, designed advertising campaigns in 2015 that took the form of documentary photography: the photographs pretended to escape a consciously organized staging while seeking to enhance a ready-to-wear collection; the models seemed to have been captured on the spot and the whole of this iconic statement was qualified through the explicit thematization of an event not associated with fashion and its products. Beyaert-Geslin (2009, p. 51) defines documentary photography as “the image produced by the practice of journalism. This practice can be called photojournalism (American version), which associates it with a given context, era and cultural sphere” (author’s translation).
It seems important to add that its purpose is not the promotion of a commercial instance and a commercial good, but the capitalization, the capture of an event. In the case of the Italian brand’s advertising campaigns, there was a difference between their medium (the magazine press, the national and/or regional daily press, poster spaces) and their genre12.
I.1. Merchant discourse transformations
These practices are representative of a movement that generally determines the merchant discourse transformations, which are transformations that respond to hybridization processes, independently of their products or services and their segments. Behind-the-scenes staging and the “making of” are not exclusively practiced by the fashion industry (Mouratidou 2012, pp. 125–134; Mouratidou 2015, pp. 91–105), neither collaborations between artists and market authorities or the attempt to make a brand or product sacred through marketing policies and communication strategies. Many researchers have questioned these market issues. For example, Bouquillion et al. (2013) demonstrate how “the values and habitus of the art world [take over] the activities of designing and conducting industrial projects” (p. 11, author’s translation), Marti (2012b, pp. 199–210) examines the transformation of brands into museums through the study of the patrimonialization of the Haribo food brand, while Dondero (2009) analyzes from a semiotic point of view the sacred in the photographic image. The scientific literature in the information and communication sciences (ICS), semiotics or sociology provides many different but semantically convergent notions that allow us to understand these hybridization and transformation processes: culturization (Bouquillion et al. 2013), culturalization (Marti 2014, pp. 57–66), artification (Heinich and Shapiro 2012), artistication (Rastier 2013) and artialization (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013). These notions testify to the transformation processes affecting the products or the processes of their communicational staging. They make it possible to grasp market pretensions and their legitimization processes (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). As the examples cited above, which come from the fashion industry’s communication strategies, they can be approached as a process of culturalization or artification. What is of great interest in these examples, however, is not only the transformation processes taking place that affect fashion, but also the spectacular density that accompanies these processes as well as their globalizing dimension. From this perspective, a twofold research problem emerges. It concerns both the meaning of the commercial spectacle as produced by the fashion industry and the political aim included in this globalizing program that integrates different common areas such as the political, artistic, cultural, sacred and religious. The commercial spectacle thus allows this industry to increase its economic and symbolic power.
I.2. The spectacular potential of the fashion industry
Fashion shows, advertising films and images, short films, “making of”, museum exhibitions, boutiques, private parties but with the right amount of media coverage, Websites and sociodigital networks, fashion and beauty editorials supported by the magazine press are some of the strategies participating directly or indirectly in the promotion of the fashion industry.
In addition, there is an entire sublimation process of the players in this industry, such as artistic directors of fashion brands, models, muses and celebrities from the entertainment industry. These strategies and actors are integrated into particularly spectacular stagings. Fashion and its entire industry is a spectacle that I propose to address here by following Guy Debord, for whom the spectacle “is not a set of images but a social relationship between people, mediated by images” (Debord 1987, p. 4, author’s translation). The images produced by the fashion industry, its actors and its events, themselves constructed as images relayed and mediated by allied industries such as the media industries, bear witness in a very spectacular way to this social relationship that the fashion industry proposes, even imposes. Its particularity is to densify this social relation-spectacle and make it particularly captive.
I.2.1. Luxury fashion
This book therefore deals with the spectacularization of the fashion industry, a spectacularization that is both economic and symbolic. More precisely, the study proposed here focuses on so-called luxury fashion13, a segment chosen for two reasons that seem to me to be complementary: that of its economic influence and that of its communication strategies. Both – economy and communication – are subject to processes of spectacularization, whether it is a question of economic data or images of esthetics calculated down to the smallest detail.
Starting from the principle that spectacularization is the “process that makes spectacular not only any art, but also any other socio-semiotic field” (Tore 2011, author’s translation), it seems relevant to consider as spectacular both the economic performance of luxury fashion and its communication performance. In June 2019, the Bloomberg Billionnaires ranking introduced in third place Bernard Arnault, CEO of the luxury group LVMH, with a personal fortune estimated at 100.4 billion dollars. In the same ranking, we also noted the names of François Pinault, of the luxury group Kering, with a personal fortune of 37.1 billion dollars, as well as the Wertheimer brothers, owners among others of Chanel, whose personal fortune is estimated at 26.7 billion dollars14. These figures represent a spectacular performance, since they are extraordinary and attract a certain amount of media interest. By advertising them, the luxury fashion industry introduces into media the space information that unfolds the spectacular potential of its economy, a potential that is transformed into a particularly media-generated event. Just as the communication strategies of this same sector, whose aim goes beyond the promotional dimension and which mobilize the spectacle for political purposes: if the spectacle in its primary, archaic form has both a communicative and political dimension15, it is supposed to lead to a life form that relates to being together. It is to this end that luxury fashion seems to use the spectacle, in order to create something common and to position itself within a project with collective, political pretensions.
The commercial luxury fashion industry has developed a particularly dense potential for spectacularization, which could be described as mediagenic (Marion 1997, pp. 61–88). This potential for spectacularization