Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco ed. by Heidi Brevik-Zender (review)

By virtue of the stylish triad “Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality,” Heidi Brevik-Zender’s recent edited volume solidifies the intellectual import of fashion within French Studies. Featuring chapters penned by nine prominent voices in the field, Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco investigates the entwined threads of couture and culture in a range of sources—including narrative fiction, the visual and decorative arts, poetry, popular theater, magazines and newspapers, advertisements, and guides to the Universal Expositions. Summoning an eclectic cohort of experts, the publication constitutes not only a major contribution to a rapidly expanding body of criticism on fashion, but also to French Studies more generally.

Arranged chronologically, the ensemble of essays addresses fashion’s connection to modernity, defined as “the era beginning with the philosophical interventions of the Enlightenment and lasting through the postwar 1920s” (2). This temporal designation provides a broad scope for the study of dress, yielding an expansive view of modernity wherein a collection of snapshots focus attention on several sub-periods, rather than on a single moment or artistic movement. As editor, Brevik-Zender convenes an impressive group of scholars who tackle questions related to social class and mobility, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, as well as fashion’s relationship to the nation, memory, and technological progress. Though some contributors (Hiner, Brevik-Zender, Potvin) have been at the forefront of the burgeoning subfield of French fashion studies for the past decade, others (Saint-Amand, Green, White) have not typically published under such a label. Bridging disciplinary gaps between literary studies, art history, and cultural criticism, the anthology foregrounds fashion’s interdisciplinary function by uniting a variety of methodological approaches under the same cover.

However, interdisciplinarity is not merely the result of assembling the diverse contributors; rather, it is implicit in the very materiality of fashion itself, as the volume makes clear. Whereas fashion has remained indissociable from modernity since at least the time of Balzac, the third titular component of materiality brings nuance to these intersecting issues. Defined as the way in which “objects of dress are ‘things,’ as Bill Brown might term them” (2), the materiality—or the object-ness of fashion—positions objects from the physical world as the mediators through which the relationship between fashion and modernity is negotiated by individual subjects. Viewed as such, fashion’s materiality pertains to the tangible forms and physical presences emanating from the attire, whose relationship to the modern subject is explored in each essay. Appropriately, the beautifully illustrated publication by the SUNY Press bolsters the distinctive material detail of the objects studied.

The opening chapters frame the fashionable and their accoutrements as social phenomena whose eighteenth-century prototypes modulate in dynamic ways in their nineteenth-century counterparts. The initial essay by Pierre Saint-Amand (and translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage) studies representations of the petit-maître—“the paragon of fashion in the eighteenth century” (11)—in texts ranging from La Nouvelle Héloïse to the Encyclopédie. Foregrounding the unstable and changing identities of this ostentatious figure across time and in different sociological contexts, Saint-Amand delivers on the stated objective to “restore [the] precedence of makeup and artifice in the male” (17). Shifting to the nineteenth century, Susan Hiner sheds light on representations of marottes, or hat-maker’s dummies, in print culture and vaudeville plays. Rightfully evoking the eighteenth-century poupées de mode as significant predecessors, Hiner marries visual readings with theoretical concepts from Marx and Freud to illuminate how labor and femininity intersect in the marrotte’s uncanny presence. Next, Anne Green explores the symbolism of gloves in the nineteenth century by establishing a historical foundation rooted in eighteenth-century works. Green charts the evolution of gloves from the Encyclopédie to the Physiologie du gant (1841), pivoting away from the accessory’s utilitarian use to highlight its...