The Arcades Project - Operi

Surrealism-"wave of dreams"-new art of fianerie. New nineteenth-century
past-Paris its classic locale. Here, fashion has opened the place of dialectical
exchange between woman and ware. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures
the century by the yard, serves as mannequin himself to save costs, and manages
single-handedly the "liquidation" that in French is called "revolution." And all this we know only since yesterday. We look on the empty
offices, and where yesterday there was . .. a room.
Fashion was never anything other than: provocation of death through the woman. Here,
with the victory of death, this provocation has ended. Deadl has erected the armature of
the whores as a pallid battle memorial on the banks of the new Lethe, which as river of
asphalt nms through the arcades.