Fashion: A Canadian Perspective (review)

Articulating the characteristics of Canadian identity can be difficult at best; seeking to define the distinctiveness of Canadian fashion is even more problematic, but Alexandra Palmer's edited volume on the subject is a welcome beginning. Essays range over the production, marketing, retailing, and consumption of fashion from the eighteenth century to the present in central and eastern Canada, representing a dynamic body of interdisciplinary scholarship by curators, artists, professors, journalists, tailors, designers, and retailers.

The essays in the book consist of a series of micro-studies of social, labour, and cultural history centring on Atlantic Canada, Quebec, and Ontario. Given the disparate topics and approaches, ranging from eighteenth-century French-Canadian masculinity to late twentieth-century fashion television, the structure of the book is somewhat forced and awkward. Nevertheless, Palmer has attempted to categorize the material into four sections that more or less move forward chronologically.

The first section, 'Fashion and Identity,' begins with an article by Eileen Stack, who examines how the blanket coat, with its origins in Aboriginal and French-Canadian societies, became the emblem of Canadian identity for the English community in Victorian Montreal. Cynthia Cooper studied fancy dress balls attended by late nineteenth-century Anglo elite of Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto to demonstrate the fine line many Canadians perceived between lavish spending and the morality of excess consumption. French-Canadian men also understood the importance of wardrobe, as revealed in Jan Noel's study of three individuals whose sartorial development between 1700 and 1867 reinforced changing notions of masculinity. Making a rather large leap forward to the 1950s and away from the consumers of fashion to the producers, Alexandra Palmer looks at how postwar Canadian couturiers, many of them European immigrants based in Montreal, sought to promote a national design identity.

'Fashion Trade and Consumption' focuses largely on the late nineteenth century and is the longest and most geographically diverse section. Tina Bates looks at the production and retailing of women's hats in Ontario between 1870 and 1930, a period that witnessed the transition from goods custom-made locally by women to a marketplace dominated by men and ready-made or imported millinery sold at large department stores. Almost all writing on Canadian fashion has centred on central Canada, so Peter J. Laroque's essay on women garment workers in 1871 Saint John, New Brunswick, and Elaine MacKay's description of the development of the nineteenth-century clothing industry in Halifax, Nova Scotia, remind us that to obtain a complete picture of Canadian fashion we need to look beyond Toronto and Montreal. However, Gail Cariou's study of Gibb and Company, a nineteenth-century tailoring enterprise, moves back to Montreal, and Elizabeth Sifton furthers reinforces that city's fashion hegemony as she traces how retailers made St Catherine Street 'the fashion mile' in the early twentieth century.

Shifting gears, part 3, 'Fashion and Transition,' centres on women consumers, beginning with Barbara Kelsey's article on the politics of dress reform in the late nineteenth century. Susan Turnbull Caton looks closely at fashion magazines during the Second World War to discover that, contrary to popular opinion, fashion was alive and well during these years; and Lydia Ferrabee Sharman interviewed Jane Harris, owner of an exclusive Montreal dress salon between 1941 and 1961, to shed light on the space in which elite Anglo women engaged with the fashionable world.

Throughout the twentieth century, the media have shaped our connection with fashion, explored in the final section, 'Fashion and Journalism.' Barbara M. Freeman traces the evolution of fashion writing in Toronto's daily newspapers between 1890 and 1900, while a century later, according to Deborah Fulsang, fashion television played an important role in creating a more demanding and discriminating audience for fashion journalism. The final article by Katherine Bosnitch seems oddly placed chronologically, as it looks at the graphic art of mid-twentieth-century Eaton's fashion ads in the Montreal Gazette to highlight the innovative connection between art and marketing.

Fashion: A Canadian Perspective moves...