Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (review)

This is a gorgeous book. Not only is it elegantly written, well researched, and persuasively argued, it is also one of the most visually stunning academic books I have ever seen. With over a hundred photographs and illustrations, it a delight to see and read.

In Couture Culture, Nancy J. Troy aims to correct a tendency among art historians to dismiss fashion as a subject unworthy of scholarly inquiry by illuminating the striking similarities in the way early-twentieth-century Paris couturiers and modern artists promoted their work (and themselves) for public consumption. Like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, leading designers Jacques Doucet, Paul Poiret, and Jeanne Paquin confronted issues of authenticity and authorship in their daily lives and artistic endeavors. Such issues are, of course, central to the modernist condition, and so we should not be surprised that they plagued artists and designers alike. But what makes Troy's work so exciting for cultural historians in general and business historians in particular is her analysis of how the couturiers skillfully balanced nineteenth-century notions of the Romantic artist with twentieth-century business realities through an active engagement with the visual and performing arts.

Poiret, Paquin, Doucet, and others recognized that attracting and retaining an elite clientele required representing themselves and their creations as unique and authentic. They were also keenly aware that their future business success hinged on their ability to reach out to a much larger consumer market. Caught between a desire to style themselves as artists and a need to make their designs accessible to the middle classes, these designers utilized the discourses of high art—cultivating friendships with prominent artists and performers, designing costumes for Paris theaters, staging theatricalized fashion shows in their own salons, and so on—to at once achieve greater public recognition while obscuring the obvious marketing aspects of such activities. Theater historians Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell similarly discuss the convergence of the theater and fashion industries in turn-of-the-century Britain in Theatre and Fashion (1994), but their focus is primarily on the relationship among performers, playwrights, and audiences and less on the business operations of the couturiers involved. Couture Culture thus presents a fresh perspective on a most intriguing topic.

Troy uses Poiret's life and career as the focal point for her book (although she does consider other couturiers, most notably Paquin). More than any other designer, Poiret embodied the "contradictory forces that shaped cultural production, distribution, and consumption across the visual and performing arts" in the age of mechanical reproduction (p. 15). Whereas designers like Charles F. Worth and Doucet used their status as art collectors to distance themselves from the more prosaic aspects of their business, Poiret merged his personal and business interests, hiring prominent illustrators, graphic artists, painters, and printmakers to sketch his models and design everything from textile patterns to office stationery. This integrated approach allowed him to present himself as a connoisseur while disguising his promotional strategies as "art."

Troy's decision to structure her analysis around Poiret's career works well in that it allows her to offer a thorough analysis of certain events, such as the couturier's famous Thousand and Second Night Party—a private fete attended by hundreds of art world figures who were required to wear the couturier's new jupes culotte designs. Drawing on an assortment of primary sources including photographs, magazine illustrations, programs, and other archival materials, Troy presents a rich, detailed reading of the fete as an example of Poiret's penchant for Orientalism. Business historians, especially those interested in issues of branding and copyright, will also appreciate her discussion of Poiret's trip to the United States in 1913 and his subsequent efforts to stop American manufacturers from copying his designs.

One of the limitations of Troy's decision to focus so intently on Poiret's career, however, is...