At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry-including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.
Mary Lynn Stewart is a professor and chair of women's studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s and coauthor of Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870-1914, both published by Johns Hopkins.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Gender, Genius & Publicity 1. Couturiers/Couturieres 2. Hybrid Modern 3. Publicity Part II: Business & the Workplace 4. Business 5. The Workplace Part III: Democratizing Fashion 6. Copying and Copyrighting 7. Shopping and Sewing Part IV: Modern Women 8. The Politics of Modern Fashion 9. The Gender of the Modern 10. The Modern Woman? Epilogue Notes Index
Dressing Modern Frenchwomen is intelligent, tremendously informative, well written, and peppered with fabulous illustrations. -- Steve Zdatny, West Virginia University, author of Fashion, Work, and Politics in Modern France
A history no college-level fashion collection should be without. Midwest Book Review Scholarly and deeply empirical, the book's detail is wonderful. -- Caroline Evans American Historical Review This is... a very valuable book. Its insights into interwar culture and business practices will be useful for all historians of the period. -- Denise Davidson Journal of Modern History This is a solid addition to scholarly knowledge on multiple topics. Stewart clearly demonstrates the importance of her subject and has mined her sources to good effect. -- John S. Hill Canadian Journal of History An illuminating book that... brings much to fashion and gender studies. -- Paul Jobling Enterprise and Society
