Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism

1. Magazines, Music, and Modernism

1 MAGAZINES, MUSIC, AND MODERNISM Every revolution begins with a change of clothes. rené bizet In the June 1923 issue of French Vogue, an unusual portrait of an unlikely subject appears amid the fashion plates. Accompanying a story about the adventures of a fictional Parisian named Palmyre, the drawing is fashion illustrator Eduardo Benito’s sketch of the “good musician” Erik Satie, “bearded and laughing like a faun.” The composer is just one of the characters in the larger tale of Palmyre’s “escapades in the world of artists,” which is part of the magazine’s feature series tracing the lives of six stylish young women in the French capital. Palmyre, in this installment, dines with Raymond Radiguet, the “author of stunning novels,” then accompanies him to the fashionable club Le Boeuf Sur le toit, “where the jazz band is all the rage.” She rubs shoulders with the Boeuf’s habitués, including Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, and Darius Milhaud, but the high point of the adventure is an encounter with Satie, “simple and good like a child.” These outings, “the dearest to Palmyre’s heart,” allow her to “partake in the current taste of elegant Parisians for nightclubs.”1 Vogue’s spotlight on Satie and his club-hopping friends not only provides surprising evidence of the group’s celebrity status in the 1920s, but also suggests that the upscale fashion press played a more significant role in defining and advocating musical modernism than has been recognized. In articles, fiction, and illustrations, a range of publications directed at a largely female readership promoted a bold ideal of good taste premised on the convergence of fashion and art, and led the way to a rejuvenating makeover of cultural life. The glossy pages of these journals offered the 1 fashionable Parisienne a guide to music in the French capital, and more importantly created momentum for the spread of a cosmopolitan musical style that was remote from the hermetic and abstract high modernism championed by contemporary music critics. In the guise of reporting on good taste, the fashion magazine in essence proposed an alternative strand of French musical modernism that found its raison d’être and its largest base of support in the feminine sphere. THE MERCURE GALANT AND THE BIRTH OF THE FASHION PRESS Although it has gone unremarked, the alliance of music and fashion is one of the oldest conventions of the periodical press, dating almost to its inception in ancien régime France.2 The Mercure Galant, one of the first French periodicals,made the connection as early as 1672,covering both topics on its pages and introducing the notion that they were essential components of an elegant lifestyle.3 With a title that evoked the mythological messenger of 2 MAGAZINES, MUSIC, AND MODERNISM FIGURE 1. Eduardo Benito, “Palmyre danse la Sévillane,” from Vogue (Paris), 1923 the gods, as well as the sensibility of pleasure and amusement that characterized the court of Louis XIV, the magazine provocatively promised in its inaugural editorial to report on a mélange of “all the things that other magazines won’t cover.”4 It held to its word: while it followed the Gazette de France by printing political news, and imitated the Journal des Savants by publishing erudite literature, the Mercure Galant went beyond the scope of either of these publications by also offering a mix of society gossip, news of marriages and deaths, notices of curiosities (Siamese twins, bearded ladies, and the like),and reviews of plays,operas,and new books.5 Published weekly and supplemented by a more elaborate numéro extraordinaire each quarter, the magazine was designed to appeal to Parisians and provincials of both sexes, and like many contemporary publications it adopted the device of the letter as its mode of communication, taking a tone that suggested good breeding and intimate snobbishness. In short, the Mercure Galant was dedicated to providing the tools necessary for a lifestyle of elegance and panache, and it established the centrality of both music and fashion to the enterprise of living well. Creating a model that remained standard in the style press for centuries, the Mercure Galant introduced a two-part formula for the treatment of music,promoting musical connoisseurship by printing criticism and feature articles, and accommodating the vogue for amateur music making by publishing scores.6 In its reviews, the magazine reported on performances at court...