window shopping on rue Sedaine | Paris 2oo9

“On the night of the Nuit Blanche, on Rue Sedaine, the clothes shop signs beckon to me. The shop windows, all lit up, attract me. Everyone is presenting texts and textures : bodies and finery, the pleasure of textures and tissues of lies, fine linen and dirty sheets… For one night, Rue Sedaine becomes a strolling theatre of the ghost stories of its signs”.

Starting from the Place de la Bastille, pedestrians encounter on their way those “lollipops” displaying words which address them“rag”: “clothes are a permanent blush on the skin of humankind ”. As soon as they turn into Rue Sedaine, usually dark at night, the first lit window of a clothes shop proclaims: “No person of either sex can force any citizen to dress in a particular way… ”. This whole narrow street thus offers itself like the strolling itinerary of a visual and at times acoustic theatre. “Fabrics used to live in this pavement passion ”. Each shop window is a stage filled with words at times arranged spatially on the glass, behind, crossing it, by letters cut out, stuck on, painted and massed. “Clothes are a form of bluff, a social usurpation. ” In several places, spectators will have the feeling that the shop window is talking, emitting sounds like a transparent, illuminated membrane. “Seeming is being ! ”

The shop fronts, usually unlit, attract people with their lighting. Everything happens in
a floating atmosphere: somewhere between late shopping and strange literary journey,
the shop windows become mirrors showing us ourselves in our simplest wrapper. “I’ve got nothing to wear (no way of being myself)!”