Download or read book Fashion Work and Politics in Modern France written by Steven M. Zdatny and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fashion Work and Politics in Modern France written by S. Zdatny and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-05-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of coiffure in modern France illuminates a host of important twentieth-century issues: the course of fashion, the travails of small business in a modern economy, the complexities of labour reform, the failure of the Popular Front, the temptations of Pétainism, all accompanied by a parade of waves, chignons, and curls.

Download or read book Fashion Work and Politics in Modern France written by S. Zdatny and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-06-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of coiffure in modern France illuminates a host of important twentieth-century issues: the course of fashion, the travails of small business in a modern economy, the complexities of labour reform, the failure of the Popular Front, the temptations of Pétainism, all accompanied by a parade of waves, chignons, and curls.

Download or read book Paris Fashion written by Valerie Steele and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paris has been the international capital of fashion for more than 300 years. Even before the rise of the haute couture, Parisians were notorious for their obsession with fashion, and foreigners eagerly followed their lead. From Charles Frederick Worth to Gabrielle "Coco†? Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent, fashion history is dominated by the names of Parisian couturiers. But Valerie Steele's Paris Fashion is much more than just a history of great designers. This fascinating book demonstrates that the success of Paris ultimately rests on the strength of its fashion culture – created by a host of fashion performers and spectators, including actresses, dandies, milliners, artists, and writers. First published in 1988 to great international acclaim, this pioneering book has now been completely revised and brought up to date, encompassing the rise of fashion's multiple world cities in the 21st century. Lavishly illustrated, deeply learned, and elegantly written, Valerie Steele's masterwork explores with brilliance and flair why Paris remains the capital of fashion.

Download or read book Dressing Modern Frenchwomen written by Mary Lynn Stewart and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A History of Hygiene in Modern France written by Steven Zdatny and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of an epochal change in the human condition that was part of what is often thought of as 'modernization' -a process that remade culture and society in France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hygiene, Steven Zdatny convincingly contends, was that change. He reflects on how the development of hygiene: changed the way people thought about and treated their bodies; put an end to age-old afflictions and brought comfort where discomfort had been the unavoidable companion of existence; and helped produce a tripling of life expectancy. The book considers how the evolution of hygiene produced a society where people washed often, changed their clothes every day, lived without lice and scabies, and performed their natural functions indoors. It reflects on developments in industrial plumbing, public education, government investment, the invention of new products to keep bodies and homes clean, and a parallel makeover in the expectations, sensibilities, and practices about what is 'proper' and what is disgusting. These developments, the study reveals, were not steady and did not happen everywhere at the same pace. But in the fullness of time, they produced a revolution in the human condition.

Download or read book Fashion and Its Social Agendas written by Diana Crane and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been said that clothes make the man (or woman), but is it still true today? If so, how has the information clothes convey changed over the years? Using a wide range of historical and contemporary materials, Diana Crane demonstrates how the social significance of clothing has been transformed. Crane compares nineteenth-century societies—France and the United States—where social class was the most salient aspect of social identity signified in clothing with late twentieth-century America, where lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity are more meaningful to individuals in constructing their wardrobes. Today, clothes worn at work signify social class, but leisure clothes convey meanings ranging from trite to political. In today's multicode societies, clothes inhibit as well as facilitate communication between highly fragmented social groups. Crane extends her comparison by showing how nineteenth-century French designers created fashions that suited lifestyles of Paris elites but that were also widely adopted outside France. By contrast, today's designers operate in a global marketplace, shaped by television, film, and popular music. No longer confined to elites, trendsetters are drawn from many social groups, and most trends have short trajectories. To assess the impact of fashion on women, Crane uses voices of college-aged and middle-aged women who took part in focus groups. These discussions yield fascinating information about women's perceptions of female identity and sexuality in the fashion industry. An absorbing work, Fashion and Its Social Agendas stands out as a critical study of gender, fashion, and consumer culture. "Why do people dress the way they do? How does clothing contribute to a person's identity as a man or woman, as a white-collar professional or blue-collar worker, as a preppie, yuppie, or nerd? How is it that dress no longer denotes social class so much as lifestyle? . . . Intelligent and informative, [this] book proposes thoughtful answers to some of these questions."-Library Journal

Download or read book Across the Waves written by Derek W Vaillant and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-10-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting's political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting governmental and other institutions shaping international radio's use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio's power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior.

Download or read book Female Beauty Systems written by Christine Adams and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female beauty systems everywhere are complex, integrating markers of class, status, power, and sexuality to perform the fundamental function of sorting individuals into categories of “more” or “less” desirable. Heirs to the tradition of courtly love, modern western female beauty systems tend to share the norm of man as pursuer, woman as pursued, having developed around the trope of the madly-desiring poet or knight supplicating his aloof and lovely lady for her favor. The apparent longevity of the courtly love tradition raises the question of whether the way in which it structures male desire in reaction to female beauty is part of a “universal” tendency, an evolutionary adaptation, despite clear evidence that female beauty systems are also, in fact, socially constructed, and reflect enormous ambivalence about the power and performance of beauty. Although modern western female beauty systems are routinely demystified and contested today, the purveyors of culture that support them—institutional, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and popular—continue as they always have to construe women as objects of male desire. Still, within this basic structure, the systems have varied greatly across time and space, with women using beauty as a form of social capital in widely differing ways. Moreover, as individuals have begun to experience their bodies as malleable and endlessly transformable, rather than unruly and unyielding, many have begun to experience beauty less as a given and more as a project. The nine essays collected here examine a number of different Western female beauty systems over the centuries, considering how women have complied with, contributed to, profited or suffered from, and resisted them.

Download or read book Dressing Up written by Elizabeth L. Block and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How wealthy American women--as consumers and as influencers--helped shape French couture of the late nineteenth century; lavishly illustrated. French fashion of the late nineteenth century is known for its allure, its ineffable chic--think of John Singer Sargent's Madame X and her scandalously slipping strap. For Parisian couturiers and their American customers, it was also serious business. In Dressing Up, Elizabeth Block examines the couturiers' influential clientele--wealthy American women who bolstered the French fashion industry with a steady stream of orders from the United States. Countering the usual narrative of the designer as solo creative genius, Block shows that these women--as high-volume customers and as pre-Internet influencers--were active participants in the era's transnational fashion system. Block describes the arrival of nouveau riche Americans on the French fashion scene, joining European royalty, French socialites, and famous actresses on the client rosters of the best fashion houses--Charles Frederick Worth, Doucet, and Félix, among others. She considers the mutual dependence of couture and coiffure; the participation of couturiers in international expositions (with mixed financial results); the distinctive shopping practices of American women, which ranged from extensive transatlantic travel to quick trips downtown to the department store; the performance of conspicuous consumption at balls and soirées; the impact of American tariffs on the French fashion industry; and the emergence of smuggling, theft, and illicit copying of French fashions in the American market as the middle class emulated the preferences of the rich. Lavishly illustrated, with vibrant images of dresses, portraits, and fashion plates, Dressing Up reveals the power of American women in French couture. Winner of the Aileen Ribeiro Grant of the Association of Dress Historians; an Association for Art History grant; and a Pasold Research Fund grant.

Download or read book France and Its Empire Since 1870 written by Alice L. Conklin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an up-to-date synthesis of the history of an extraordinary nation--one that has been shrouded in myths, many of its own making--France and Its Empire Since 1870 seeks both to understand these myths and to uncover the complicated and often contradictory realities that underpin them. It situates modern French history in transnational and global contexts and also integrates the themes of imperialism and immigration into the traditional narrative. Authors Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky begin with the premise that while France and the U.S. are sister republics, they also exhibit profound differences that are as compelling as their apparent similarities. The authors frame the book around the contested emergence of the French Republic--a form of government that finally appears to have a permanent status in France--but whose birth pangs were much more protracted than those of the American Republic. Presenting a lively and coherent narrative of the major developments in France's tumultuous history since 1870, the authors organize the chapters around the country's many turning points and confrontations. They also offer detailed analyses of politics, society, and culture, considering the diverse viewpoints of men and women from every background including the working class and the bourgeoisie, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims, Bretons and Algerians, rebellious youth, and gays and lesbians.

Download or read book Gender and French Identity after the Second World War 1944 1954 written by Kelly Ricciardi Colvin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The enfranchisement of women in Charles de Gaulle's France in 1944 is considered a potent element in the nation's self-crafted, triumphant World War Two narrative: the French, conquered by the Germans, valiantly resisted until they rescued themselves and built a new democracy, honoring France's longstanding liberal traditions. Kelly Ricciardi Colvin's Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954 calls that potent element into question. By analyzing a range of sources, including women's magazines, trials, memoirs, and spy novels, this book explores the ways in which culture was used to limit the power of the female vote. It exposes a wide network of constructed behavioral norms that supported a conservative vision of French identity. Taken together, they depicted men as virile Resistors for French democracy and history, and women as solely domestic support. Indeed Colvin shows that women's access to the vote emerged alongside an explosion of cultural messages that encouraged them to retreat into the home, to find mates, to have 'millions of beautiful babies', in the words of de Gaulle, and not to challenge patriarchy in any way. This is a vital study for understanding the nature of postwar France and women's history in 20th-century Europe.

Download or read book Coiffures written by Carol de Dobay Rifelj and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines nineteenth-century hairstyles and their cultural associations, and analyzes the social and symbolic roles that hair played in literary representations of the new body ideal of the era in fashion magazines, and as clues to social status, sexual availability and character in the fiction of major French authors including Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola.

Download or read book Pr t Porter Paris and Women written by Alexis Romano and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy. Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68. By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age written by Geraldine Biddle-Perry and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last century, there has been a revolution in self-presentation and social attitudes towards hair. Developments in mass manufacturing, advances in chemical science and new understandings of bodies and minds have been embraced by new kinds of hairdressers and their clientele and embodied in styles that reflect shifting ideals of what it is to be and to look modern. The emergence of the ladies hairdressing salon, the rise of the celebrity stylist, the impact of Hollywood, an expanding mass media, and a new synergy between fashions in clothing and hairstyles have rippled out globally. Fashions in hair styles and their representation have taken on new meanings as a way of resisting dominant social structures, experimenting with social taboos, and expressing a modern sense of self. From the 1920s bob to the punk cut, hair has continued to be deeply involved in society's larger issues. Drawing on a wealth of visual, textual and object sources, and illustrated with 75 images, A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age presents essays that explore how politics, science, religion, fashion, beauty, the visual arts, and popular culture have reshaped modern hair and its significance as an agent of social change.

Download or read book The Force of Beauty written by Holly Grout and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-05-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The market for commercial beauty products exploded in Third Republic France, with a proliferation of goods promising to erase female imperfections and perpetuate an aesthetic of femininity that conveyed health and respectability. While the industry's meteoric growth helped to codify conventional standards of womanhood, The Force of Beauty goes beyond the narrative of beauty culture as a tool for sociopolitical subjugation to show how it also targeted women as important consumers in major markets and created new avenues by which they could express their identities and challenge or reinforce gender norms. As cosmetics companies and cultural media, from magazines to novels to cinema, urged women to aspire to commercial standards of female perfection, beauty evolved as a goal to be pursued rather than a biological inheritance. The products and techniques that enabled women to embody society's feminine ideal also taught them how to fashion their bodies into objects of desire and thus offered a subversive tool of self-expression. Holly Grout explores attempts by commercial beauty culture to reconcile a standard of respectability with female sexuality, as well as its efforts to position French women within the global phenomenon of changing views on modern womanhood. Grout draws on a wide range of primary sources-hygiene manuals, professional and legal debates about the right to fabricate and distribute "medicines," advertisements for beauty products, and contemporary fiction and works of art-to explore how French women navigated changing views on femininity. Her seamless integration of gender studies with business history, aesthetics, and the history of medicine results in a textured and complex study of the relationship between the politics of womanhood and the politics of beauty.

Download or read book Exclusions written by Julie Fette and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, the French Third Republic banned naturalized citizens from careers in law and medicine for up to ten years after they had obtained French nationality. In 1940, the Vichy regime permanently expelled all lawyers and doctors born of foreign fathers and imposed a 2 percent quota on Jews in both professions. On the basis of extensive archival research, Julie Fette shows in Exclusions that doctors and lawyers themselves, despite their claims to embody republican virtues, persuaded the French state to enact this exclusionary legislation. At the crossroads of knowledge and power, lawyers and doctors had long been dominant forces in French society: they ran hospitals and courts, doubled as university professors, held posts in parliament and government, and administered justice and public health for the nation. Their social and political influence was crucial in spreading xenophobic attitudes and rendering them more socially acceptable in France. Fette traces the origins of this professional protectionism to the late nineteenth century, when the democratization of higher education sparked efforts by doctors and lawyers to close ranks against women and the lower classes in addition to foreigners. The legislatively imposed delays on the right to practice law and medicine remained in force until the 1970s, and only in 1997 did French lawyers and doctors formally recognize their complicity in the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime. Fette's book is a powerful contribution to the argument that French public opinion favored exclusionary measures in the last years of the Third Republic and during the Holocaust.