Americanizing French Fashion Plates: Godey's and Peterson's Cultural and Socio-Economic Translation of Les Modes Parisiennes

Godey's Lady's Book (1830-1898) and Peterson's Magazine (1842-1898) dominated the American women's magazine industry in the nineteenth century, combining factual articles, light fiction, sewing projects, domestic and child management, recipes and fashion, all of which remain the staple of such journals today.¹ Although they provide fascinating insights into women's lives and concerns, they also suffered from scholarly neglect until comparatively recently. Furthermore, although the journals are now recognized for the rich source material they provide, negative analyses regarding them are still quite easy to find. Commenting upon Godey's, John L. Nevinson states that the journal "is much more famous for its other contents than for its fashion articles; its plates, often copied from French engravings, are of low quality and rather crudely colored."² In his remarks about the copies of French engravings, Nevinson touches upon the key item for which these and similar journals are often remembered: the hand-colored fashion plates, which were the Vogue fashion news and even pin-up girls of their day.

Recent studies of nineteenth-century fashion plates reveal more about modern intellectual preoccupations than they do about the fashion culture of the time. Analyses concerned with feminist and women's studies typically summarize the biographies of the Colin sisters, Héloïse (1820-1875), Anaïs (1822-1899), Laure (1820-1878) and Isabelle (1850-1907). Skilled painters trained by their father, they produced innumerable plates for French and European fashion publications which the American journals subsequently copied. Feminist interpretations of their profession focus on the unfairness of women's lives as their careers "indicate the ways in which women artists were pushed in different directions from those followed by their fathers, brothers, and sons."³

The second primary analytical direction focuses on the question of art. Eventually their authors agree that "the fashion plate is a minor art form."⁴ But debating the status of fashion plates as "high art" is a disservice, as the discussion evaluates the plates by standards and definitions by which the artists and consumers did not measure their work. At the heart of the debate is Monet's Women in the Garden of 1866-1867 in which he clearly derived the poses, clothing and placement of his model Camille from fashion plates.⁵ The situation is further complicated by Cézanne's fashion plate-based series of 1870-1871, particularly La Promenade, which he copied directly from a plate that appeared in La Mode Illustrée. The fact that "great" artists used fashion plates for inspiration leads art historians to reassess fashion plates themselves, for the core question is how could a "great" artist find inspiration in something so ordinary or even mediocre as a fashion plate, which was governed by rules of absolute realism (so that the garments might be reproduced) and dominated by contrived poses (to highlight specific features of the clothing)? Consequently, John Rewald's highly subjective remarks are in many ways a natural result of the art debate: in discussing La Promenade, he comments that the "insipid ladies" are now infused with "strange and dramatic power," a comment that combines both derision of Cézanne's source material and validation of the resulting painting.⁶

In this dialog regarding art, women artists and periodic academic dismissal of the journals' contents, the last of which frequently applies to European magazines as well as their American counterparts, one particular topic remains neglected: that of the American editors' translation and re-presentation of the French fashions to their middleclass readership. Scholars like Nevinson are right to criticize Godey's and Peterson's for the common practice of making unauthorized copies of the French originals with inconsistent levels of quality. However, dismissing the fashions presented in the plagiarized plates is a convenient means of avoiding analysis regarding any differences between the French original and the American copy. Because the duplication process involved inevitable delay, sweeping generalizations regarding it and alterations of the contents also avoid in-depth study. Thus Stella Blum's comment is...