The Arcades Project - Operi

The Hower as emblem of sin and its via crucis through the stations of the arcades,
of fashion, of Redon's painting-which Marius and Ary Leblond have described
by saying, "It is a cosmogony of flowers;'
More on fashion: what the child (and, through faint reminiscence, the man)
discovers in the pleats of the old material to which it fastens while trailing at its
mother's skirts.
Floral forms in the drawings of cyclothymes, which for their part recall drawings
made by mediums.
Story of the child with its mother in a panorama. The panorama is presenting the Battle of
Sedan. The child regrets that the sky is overcast. (IThat's what the weather is like in war;'
answers the mother. '0°,4>
At the end of the 18605, Alphonse Kan writes that no one knows how to make :rn.llTOrS
anymore.
The rationalist theory of fashion appears very characteristically in Karr. It bears a resem­
blance to the religious theories of the Enlightenment. Karr thinks, for example, that long
skirts come into fashion because certain women have an interest in concealing an unlovely
foot. Or he denounces, as the origin of certain types of hats and certain hairstyles, the
'Wish to compensate for thin hair,
Addendum to the remarks on Metro stations : it is owing to these stations that the
names of places where Napoleon I gained a victory are transformed into gods of
the underworld.