Dressing Modern Frenchwomen: Marketing Haute Couture, 1919-1939 (review)

"The practical dress becomes necessary as feminine activity develops . . . women, being more independent, take on a more individual appearance." So ran the caption to a fashion illustration in Vogue on September 1, 1924, but which also crystallizes the central thesis elaborated by Mary Lynne Stewart in her deeply researched and laudable book about clothing and female identities in interwar France. Ten years in the making, Stewart has sifted an almost unmanageable mass of archival material including department store catalogs and a dozen periodicals, chiefly: French Vogue, Marie Claire, La Mode Pratique, Femina, and Le Jardin des Modes. By this measure, her focus is not on clothing per se but, in keeping with Roland Barthes, how it is mediated through word and image to promote the feminine ideal in dress. The central plank of the study is hybrid modernity, a term she deploys to analyze how editors, designers, and manufacturers sought to popularize haute couture styles across the class spectrum and, in the process, to frame the modern as a female/feminine pursuit.

As Stewart explains, this redefinition of gender hinged initially on the female fashion designer, with a greater number of couturières emerging in the interwar period in France than ever before. Their number included, of course, eminences such as Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet, who relied on the cut and line of fabric to produce garments with a pared-down tubular profile that emphasized freedom of movement, and Elsa Schiaparelli and Sonja Delaunay, both of whom allied the new silhouette to the use of vibrant color and bold geometric patterns, often based on ethnographic influences. But equally instrumental were less well-known designers like Jane Regny, whose stock in trade was sports- and leisurewear, and Louise Boulanger, who designed shift-style dresses that were decorated at the hip with sashes. While all these women contested the hegemony of Paul Poiret and the male couturier's artistic status of créateur, they also faced challenges of their own in designing garments that were relevant to the majority of modern women in the 1920s and 1930s. However, liberational the simplified profile of their apparel may have been, it was designed for an ideal body type: thin, flat chested and young. In this regard, their models were ill suited to the maternal body and thus ran counter to polemic for the promotion of the national birth rate. Stewart thoughtfully addresses this debate and the distaste that fashion magazines had for the pregnant—and, by extension, the aging—body. She cavils that none of the four hundred covers of titles like Vogue or Femina that she consulted represented "perceptibly pregnant figures." and yet, one is also left to ask: why would we expect anything else of such image- and style-oriented periodicals?

Many periodicals did have a significant role to play, however, in the democratization of fashion and, accordingly, they mobilized the dress styles of the rich and famous (including actresses, dubbed les élégantes) to foster good taste and to bolster the position of Paris (qua France) as its social and economic arbiter. On a limited scale, couturières themselves had already allowed this to happen as some of their models were replicated as made-to-measure garments for a prosperous international clientele. But more pivotal were the department store and catalog in enabling haute couture to be customized for confection (ready-to-wear), and home dressmaking in enabling the majority of Frenchwomen to co-opt high fashion for affordable dress. Thereby, fashion editors, designers, manufacturers, and consumers combined to forge a meaningful link between the idealized appearance of the mannequin or chic Parisienne and the everyday existence of the average female, whether she lived in the capital or the provinces, or subsisted as a worker or mother/housewife.

As Stewart also insists, individual magazines displayed their own editorial bias and thus attracted different readerships. And yet, in one way or another, both upmarket...