An Interpretative Tour of Paris as Fashion Capital

Rocamora's Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion, and the Media could equally be titled Paris: A Phenomenology of Fashion. In 187 dense, often readable pages, Rocamora shows us how and why Paris became the capital of fashion and which ways Parisian fashion is distinctly so. Her leaping-off point is an October 2004 cover of L'Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode de Paris (L'Officiel) titled ça c'est Paris. Rocamora responsibly provides a duplication of the cover (fig. 1), which features a model staring directly at the camera, her right shoulder turned forward, facing us. She has curly, long, light-brown hair; gorgeous full lips; what appears to be a blue or green eye peeking from behind a tilted tweed Chanel hat—she is wearing a matching tweed jacket, full-on Chanel style. Her face is strong and determined. The light is radiating behind her. She has olive skin from that Romano-Gallic heritage. A daughter of royalty and revolution. She is definitely seducing you. Once you meet her you must return. If you have never met her you still dream about her—her trope will never be exhausted—both in media and literature as well as in real life. Paris is known for its beautiful and intelligent women and therefore for its beautiful and intelligent fashion. This translates into a complex and complicated identity as a global phenomenon saturated with important ontological, epistemological, temporal, and metaphysical problems (as are all phenomena, of course, but some are exemplary, such as this one).

In order to elucidate the phenomenon of Paris as fashioned by fashion and fashioning fashion, Rocamora's project is implicitly linguistic and hermeneutical. She inquires what lies behind or within the image, its being paired with words on the cover of Paris's L'Officiel magazine, what it is representative of, the rich history enmeshed therein. She argues that ça connotes "a world of luxury goods, glamorous haunts, and fashionable lifestyles, made all the more seductive by the flow of enticing images and words that will pass by the eyes of the readers as they flick through the pages of the magazine (xiii)." And so the spectacle of the historical event that is Paris is opened up to us from the beginning as both a "material and discursive reality" (3). Rocamora invites us to come with her on this journey, which is, like all good hermeneutics should be, both an interrogation into the nature of discourse itself and a rigorously historical analysis of events in the flow of time. It can also be seen as a sort of scholarly guidebook of Paris.

Fig. 1.

"Ça c'est Paris." L'Officiel. October 2004.

© L'Officiel.

Interestingly enough, Rocamora does not fully lay out her methodology until the third chapter. We get smatterings of Bourdieuian theory in the introduction and the first two chapters, but again, it is not until the third that Rocamora makes clear her scholarly intentions. She begins here with Bourdieu's interweaving of material and symbolic production—the main idea being that material things are imbued with or ontologically constitutive of a bevy of ideological, historical, and cultural meaning. For the purpose of this work, of course, Rocamora wants to focus particularly on fashion and fashion media discourse as an exemplary phenomenon. As such, the first example noted is the designer label, or the griffe, which is a real material object with its own particular history capable of transubstantiating a piece of cloth into a valuable or culturally important piece of cloth. Moreover, such a methodology takes into account Bourdieu's notion of a "field" of cultural production. From here Rocamora turns to Foucault to suggest that "media discourses invest fashion—its products, practices and agents—with a variety of values whose 'truth' is as much a part of the object of discourse as the material reality it refers to" (56). A symbol is not merely a label pointing what...