Editor's Introduction: Fashion and Fashionability in Modern French and Francophone Culture

Editor's Introduction: Fashion and Fashionability in Modern French and Francophone Culture Sima Godfrey FOR MOST ANGLOPHONE READERS of French literature there are few opening lines of verse as familiar or nostalgic as Ronsard's entreaty to Cassandra: "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose..." Tapping memories of early classroom lessons in poetics and the rhetoric of seduction, the line opens an imaginary filefolder containing lectures on the sixteenth-century poets of the Pléiade and their odes, sonnets and love poetry. Such, in any case, was my limited association with that poem, more specifically, with that opening line, when, in October 1983,1 stumbled across it quite unexpectedly in a full-page advertisement in Vogue magazine. The ad was for a French lace bra. In the photo, a wellgroomed model, wearing only makeup, pearls and white underwear stares out at the viewer in a sexually suggestive pose.1 She is semi-reclined on a satin sheet with, behind her right shoulder, a backdrop of roses that encircle the name "Ronsard" in white boldface letters. Below her left breast, in smaller black print, the ad copy begins: " 'Mignonne allons voir si ¡arose...' Pierre de Ronsard" (Fig. 1). Though the bra in question was manufactured, one assumes, by the Ronsard in white, the association with the Ronsard in black is clear and unabashed. The copy continues: Named for France's "prince of poets," designed for the woman of infinite romance, each Ronsard bra is individually appliquéed in gleaming satin on sheer tulle. Direct from France, Princesse refines the art of under wire support in sizes B and C. with matching panties and garter belts in a quartet of soft, subtle shades. —Slip into a sonnet. At the time, I remember being struck by how outrageous and funny the ad seemed to me on the one—Anglo-American—hand, and by how perfectly normal it seemed to me on the other—Gallic—one. For, if as a participant in Anglophone culture, I could not imagine a major, canonical figure in literary history being used to peddle "the art of underwire support" (the closest equivalent I could think of was the "Whitman Sampler," an American box of candy, doubtless unrelated to the 19thcentury poet), as an observer and occasional participant in French VOL. XXXVII, NO. 1 5 L'Esprit Créateur Fig. 1. Vogue magazine, October 1983 Spring 1997 Godfrey culture I found the juxtaposition of Ronsard's ode and fancy women's underwear, not only witty, but semiotically sound. For one thing, the lace underwear and Ronsard's ode could both be read as willful acts of seduction. (The pedant in me further took special pleasure in recalling Ronsard's poetic celebration of women's breasts.2) More significantly, however, the reason the ad worked was because the opening Une of Ronsard 's ode and the image of impeccable high-fashion lingerie both clearly functioned as recognizable indices of cultural francité, not unlike the haute cuisine and red wine whose mythologies Roland Barthes has analyzed so well. The Renaissance ode and the exclusive lace bra connoted, respectively, French high culture (la haute culture) and French high fashion (la haute couture) and together on one page they reminded us of the cultural imbrication of the two.3 If Vogue magazine protocols of chic in the 1980s called for the purchase of exquisite Parisian fashion and a passing familiarity with Ronsard , in academic periodicals of the same time Parisian chic was ruling in the form of intellectual fashion. Academics and journalistic critics alike spruced up their discourse with a variety of French accessories, ranging from jouissance to différance, each item carrying its own conspicuous price tag of cultural capital. They spoke arcanely of "the mirror stage" and condemned books they disapproved of as "phallocratie enterprises of totalization. " And they wore these concepts pinned to their lapels like proud badges—or brooches—of their allegiance to Ie dernier mot, the latest and the last word. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss in the introduction to their volume On Fashion note that "Fashion entered the academy by way of 'French theory,' whose stylish, wickedly witty, playful intellectualism made our heads spin."4 Sandra Gilbert and Susan...