Research Catalog

Title

Dressing modern Frenchwomen : marketing haute couture, 1919-1939 / Mary Lynn Stewart.

Author

Stewart, Mary Lynn, 1945-

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Supplementary Content

• Contributor biographical information
• Publisher description

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xvii, 305 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Fashion merchandising > France > History > 20th century
• Women's clothing industry > France > History > 20th century

Bibliography (note)

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

Contents

Pt. I. Gender; Genius & Publicity -- 1. Couturiers/Couturieres -- 2. Hybrid Modern -- 3. Publicity -- Pt. II. Business & the Workplace -- 4. Business -- 5. The Workplace -- Pt. III. Democratizing Fashion -- 6. Copying and Copyrighting -- 7. Shopping and Sewing -- Pt. IV. Modern Women -- 8. The Politics of Modern Fashion -- 9. The Gender of the Modern -- 10. The Modern Woman?

ISBN

• 9780801888038 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 0801888034 (hardcover : alk. paper)

LCCN

• 2007033661
• 40015259615

OCLC

• ocn166290624
• 166290624
• SCSB-9037121

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries