Dressing modern Frenchwomen : marketing haute couture, 1919-1939

Author(s)

• Stewart-McDougall, Mary Lynn

Bibliographic Information

Dressing modern Frenchwomen : marketing haute couture, 1919-1939

Mary Lynn Stewart

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008

• : hardcover : alk

Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-296) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry-including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Gender, Genius & Publicity 1. Couturiers/Couturieres 2. Hybrid Modern 3. Publicity Part II: Business & the Workplace 4. Business 5. The Workplace Part III: Democratizing Fashion 6. Copying and Copyrighting 7. Shopping and Sewing Part IV: Modern Women 8. The Politics of Modern Fashion 9. The Gender of the Modern 10. The Modern Woman? Epilogue Notes Index

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

• NCID: BA87290810
• ISBN:
  • 9780801888038
• LCCN: 2007033661
• Country Code: us
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: Baltimore
• Pages/Volumes: xvii, 305 p.
• Size: 24 cm
• Classification:
  • LCC : HD9940.F8
  • DC22 : 338.4/7687082
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : Women's clothing industry -- France -- History -- 20th century
  • LCSH : Fashion merchandising -- France -- History -- 20th century