Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France

An interdisciplinary examination of French fashion, modernity, and materiality from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

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This anthology explores connections between dress and modernity through interdisciplinary French humanities scholarship. It brings to life the reciprocal relationships between fashion and a range of primary source materials, including literary fiction, paintings, social commentaries, decorative arts, fashion magazines, mass-circulating newspapers, popular theatrical works, trade publications, and advertisements, among others. The book centers on a specific constellation of concerns—fashion, modernity, and materiality from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries—giving depth of focus. Themes include fashion's relationship to the arts, material production, conflict, memory, the nation, social class, race, and gender and sexuality. Among the broader questions framing the volume are some that remain highly pertinent today: What are the various and complex relationships that exist between clothing and the lived body? How do garments hold traces of the past and activate memories of the human experience? In which ways do clothing and adornment express sexualities? How does fashion help to define what it meant and means to be modern? Together, the essays demonstrate fashion's broad reach and appeal as an interdisciplinary category of analysis.