Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (review)

In Classic Chic Mary E. Davis presents an engaging account of the connections between modernist music and other cultural phenomena, especially haute couture fashion, in early twentieth-century France. This beautifully produced book, with many wonderful illustrations, provides an insight into the cultural world of modernist Paris and its transatlantic influences, especially through American ragtime and jazz and in the Conde Nast publications Vogue and Vanity Fair. In the extrapolation of her core argument, that "the upscale fashion press played a more significant role in defining and advocating musical modernism than has been recognized" (1), Davis unearths a welter of fascinating cultural moments. There is enough material in this volume to appeal to the side of us that wants the scandals of the age to come alive—the account of Coco Chanel's affair with Igor Stravisnky in 1920–21 for example—but such aspects are presented in meticulous and measured detail, and are clearly the result of scrupulous research.

Classic Chic is not a volume of anecdotes and scandals, but a contribution to ongoing debates about the relationship of modernism and the modernist avant-garde to the popular and fashionable culture of the early twentieth century. Michael Murphy, in his important essay on Vanity Fair, pointed to the central place of "cultural savvy" in bohemian modernism, and was one of the initial critics to resist and rework the "contamination anxiety" that Andreas Huyssen identified at the heart of modernism's relationship to mass culture.¹ With studies such as Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999), which juxtaposed the fashion craze for Egyptiana with Joyce's Ulysses, or David Chinitz's T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003), which revealed Eliot's fascination with comic-strips and vaudeville, the standard has been set for the examination of modernist culture as a diverse field of effect that encompasses the extremes of elitism and the popularity of the fashionable and savvy.

In her contribution Davis presents many fascinating moments in early twentieth-century Parisian cultural life, unearthing Paul Poiret's interest in French rococo music and promotion of it at his lavish entertainments, and weaving together the Orientalist threads of the prewar period, from the Ballet Russes's Scheherezade to Poiret's "harem pants." Returning again and again to Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, Davis argues very persuasively for its importance in cementing the relationship between fashion and music. Davis also demonstrates the links between the key figures of her study, Erik Satie, Stravinsky, Chanel, Cocteau, Picasso, and Diagilev's troupe. (Fig. 1) Her account of the Ballet Russes's Parade (1917) pulls together the different elements that went into the ballet, from the actual ragtime dance that Satie drew on in his composition for the Little American Girl's dance to Picasso's 10 by 17 meter canvas curtain. Similarly, there are detailed accounts of the development of Chanel's fashion aesthetic and wonderful analyses of Satie and Stravinsky's compositions. Also notable is the very careful reading of Satie's Sports et divertissements, in which Davis presents the context for the composition, including the particular relationship to the French fashion periodicals La Gazette du Bon Ton and Femina. The close reading of the interplay of Satie's scores and texts with Charles Martin's 1914 and 1922 illustrations is insightful and illuminating. What emerges is an emphasis on Sports et divertissements, not as a general, prototypically modernist piece, but as a composition that emerges specifically within the contemporary context of the art and fashion worlds. Stravinsky is also read in a different light, with Davis highlighting the "contemporary fashionability" (184) of his Symphonies, rather than identifying it as high modernism, or proto-abstractionism.

By drawing Chanel and Stravinsky together, and not merely as bedfellows, Davis unearths dominant trends in high fashion, music, and culture, such as Chanel's "little black dress" and Stravisnky's neoclassicism, which elevate "simplicity" to the apex of a fashionable aesthetic...