In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Enterprise & Society 4.2 (2003) 401-403



[Access article in PDF]
Alexandra Palmer. Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001. viii + 352 pp. ISBN 0-7748-0826-8, $60.00.

Couture and Commerce is exceptional in offering both lavishly illustrated fashion history and a superbly researched scholarly monograph. Alexandra Palmer based her seven-chapter work on evidence provided by the archives of postwar couture houses, contemporary journalism, oral histories of buyers and consumers of couture and, perhaps most significantly, garments housed in the Royal Ontario Museum. She examines the transatlantic trade in couture though a detailed case study of Toronto and the fashion consumption of elite English-Canadian women during the period 1945-1960, which she identifies as one of great change in both Canadian and fashion history. The rise in European immigrants in Toronto placed renewed emphasis on social ritual and hierarchies for the social elite and, in broader terms, aligned Canadian culture more firmly with that of Europe. In terms of fashion history, the period witnessed both the peak and the demise of the haute couture industry. One initially might perceive little relation between the two histories, but by her concluding chapter Palmer has made a convincing case for understanding commerce in style and couture as inextricably bound to the shifts in the class formations of Canada and its postwar cultural identity.

This work challenges several commonly held assumptions regarding the commerce of fashion and the nature of couture. Most significantly, it undermines the simplistic notion of couture as an iconic object of emulation. Through what might be broadly termed a material culture approach, Palmer traces the "life" of several worn articles [End Page 401] of dress to reveal how women altered them over several years and treated them more as investments than as expressive mantels, and how even the most haute couture of articles was designed in accordance with the particular tastes of a given client.

The production of couture was policed according to a strictly ranked hierarchy of makers (overseen officially since the nineteenth century by La Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne), but its consumption had become incredibly complex by the 1950s. This is best revealed in Palmer's extensive discussion of "bonded models": garments bought as design sources by American retailers and manufacturers. Under customs law such models were allowed in the country for a maximum of six months before they had to be shipped on or destroyed; the penalty for keeping the merchandise was a hefty duty charge. One New York store prided itself on challenging the audience at its fashion shows to be able to distinguish the original haute couture article from its bonded model versions, so accurate were its copies.

In Toronto many women who could afford the "real" couture pieces tellingly preferred the bonded models. They retained the status of couture but were often altered to suit local tastes and purposes by elimination of the extreme avant-garde elements of some of the original designs. Bonded designs, though seemingly undermining the very fastidiousness with which the fashion houses protected their creations, offered enormous commercial benefit through the sheer numbers sold. There was, perhaps, an assumption that the haute couture customer so protected by the fashion house vendeuse from buying what was described in the trade as a "Ford" (a design readily taken up by mass production) would not be the same customer for the bargain bonded model. Frequently, however, as Palmer shows, she was. The success of the cheaper bonded models whetted the appetite for the prêt-à-porter market that would eventually be the undoing of the couture industry.

Certainly, this is no ordinary history of couture costume, which typically tends toward the "couture as art" or the "couturier as genius" mold. Rather it offers a sophisticated and complex examination of the means though which commodities are mediated and realized by producers and consumers in specific localities and economies. This is where Palmer's insistence on turning to the actual objects as primary sources, in the form of items such as...

pdf

Share