darkness visible

"While the bourgeois household was reluctant to admit gas because of its unpleasant smell and its poisonous, explosive nature, all doors were immediately opened to electric light. 'The Edison light is penetrating not only into rooms that are at present lit by gas, but even into those that are closed to it - that is, elegant apartments and drawing-rooms - and chandeliers and candelabra.' It was electricity's properties as a pure, odourless and non-physical form of energy that made it immediately acceptable in drawing rooms.

"...An analogy between electrical power and finance capital springs to mind. The concentration and centralisation of energy in high-capacity power stations corresponded to the concentration of economic power in big banks." Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night via

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Fashion, like architecture, inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective. The latter awakes, for example, in advertising. Walter Benjamin, Arcades.