Fashion Work And Politics In Modern France

This history of coiffure in modern France illuminates a host of important twentieth-century issues: the course of fashion, the travails of small business in a modern economy, the complexities of labour reform, the failure of the Popular Front, the temptations of Pétainism, all accompanied by a parade of waves, chignons, and curls.

This history of coiffure in modern France illuminates a host of important twentieth-century issues: the course of fashion, the travails of small business in a modern economy, the complexities of labour reform, the failure of the Popular Front, the temptations of Pétainism, all accompanied by a parade of waves, chignons, and curls.

This book tells the story of an epochal change in the human condition that was part of what is often thought of as 'modernization' -a process that remade culture and society in France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hygiene, Steven Zdatny convincingly contends, was that change. He reflects on how the development of hygiene: changed the way people thought about and treated their bodies; put an end to age-old afflictions and brought comfort where discomfort had been the unavoidable companion of existence; and helped produce a tripling of life expectancy. The book considers how the evolution of hygiene produced a society where people washed often, changed their clothes every day, lived without lice and scabies, and performed their natural functions indoors. It reflects on developments in industrial plumbing, public education, government investment, the invention of new products to keep bodies and homes clean, and a parallel makeover in the expectations, sensibilities, and practices about what is 'proper' and what is disgusting. These developments, the study reveals, were not steady and did not happen everywhere at the same pace. But in the fullness of time, they produced a revolution in the human condition.

Paris has been the international capital of fashion for more than 300 years. Even before the rise of the haute couture, Parisians were notorious for their obsession with fashion, and foreigners eagerly followed their lead. From Charles Frederick Worth to Gabrielle "Coco†? Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent, fashion history is dominated by the names of Parisian couturiers. But Valerie Steele's Paris Fashion is much more than just a history of great designers. This fascinating book demonstrates that the success of Paris ultimately rests on the strength of its fashion culture – created by a host of fashion performers and spectators, including actresses, dandies, milliners, artists, and writers. First published in 1988 to great international acclaim, this pioneering book has now been completely revised and brought up to date, encompassing the rise of fashion's multiple world cities in the 21st century. Lavishly illustrated, deeply learned, and elegantly written, Valerie Steele's masterwork explores with brilliance and flair why Paris remains the capital of fashion.

In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting's political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting governmental and other institutions shaping international radio's use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio's power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior.

Female beauty systems everywhere are complex, integrating markers of class, status, power, and sexuality to perform the fundamental function of sorting individuals into categories of “more” or “less” desirable. Heirs to the tradition of courtly love, modern western female beauty systems tend to share the norm of man as pursuer, woman as pursued, having developed around the trope of the madly-desiring poet or knight supplicating his aloof and lovely lady for her favor. The apparent longevity of the courtly love tradition raises the question of whether the way in which it structures male desire in reaction to female beauty is part of a “universal” tendency, an evolutionary adaptation, despite clear evidence that female beauty systems are also, in fact, socially constructed, and reflect enormous ambivalence about the power and performance of beauty. Although modern western female beauty systems are routinely demystified and contested today, the purveyors of culture that support them—institutional, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and popular—continue as they always have to construe women as objects of male desire. Still, within this basic structure, the systems have varied greatly across time and space, with women using beauty as a form of social capital in widely differing ways. Moreover, as individuals have begun to experience their bodies as malleable and endlessly transformable, rather than unruly and unyielding, many have begun to experience beauty less as a given and more as a project. The nine essays collected here examine a number of different Western female beauty systems over the centuries, considering how women have complied with, contributed to, profited or suffered from, and resisted them.

How wealthy American women--as consumers and as influencers--helped shape French couture of the late nineteenth century; lavishly illustrated. French fashion of the late nineteenth century is known for its allure, its ineffable chic--think of John Singer Sargent's Madame X and her scandalously slipping strap. For Parisian couturiers and their American customers, it was also serious business. In Dressing Up, Elizabeth Block examines the couturiers' influential clientele--wealthy American women who bolstered the French fashion industry with a steady stream of orders from the United States. Countering the usual narrative of the designer as solo creative genius, Block shows that these women--as high-volume customers and as pre-Internet influencers--were active participants in the era's transnational fashion system. Block describes the arrival of nouveau riche Americans on the French fashion scene, joining European royalty, French socialites, and famous actresses on the client rosters of the best fashion houses--Charles Frederick Worth, Doucet, and Félix, among others. She considers the mutual dependence of couture and coiffure; the participation of couturiers in international expositions (with mixed financial results); the distinctive shopping practices of American women, which ranged from extensive transatlantic travel to quick trips downtown to the department store; the performance of conspicuous consumption at balls and soirées; the impact of American tariffs on the French fashion industry; and the emergence of smuggling, theft, and illicit copying of French fashions in the American market as the middle class emulated the preferences of the rich. Lavishly illustrated, with vibrant images of dresses, portraits, and fashion plates, Dressing Up reveals the power of American women in French couture. Winner of the Aileen Ribeiro Grant of the Association of Dress Historians; an Association for Art History grant; and a Pasold Research Fund grant.