In this highly original book, Susan E. Hiner looks behind fashion's seams and focuses on the women fashion producers - both working- and middle-class - who were key to shaping the French fashion economy. Behind the Seams thus opens up the fields of both fashion and French cultural studies and explores new ways of understanding the 19th century by demonstrating that these women's complex and contradictory roles as producers of luxury items left them exploited by an oppressive fashion system even as they served as influencers within it.
In 19th-century France, fashion was a powerful and lucrative network that depended on women's expert manipulation of its raw materials. The delicate finger work of seamstresses and modistes yielded frothy dresses and ethereal hats; the subtle, persuasive rhetoric of written chronicles resulted in savvy, targeted marketing campaigns of goods and lifestyles; and the stylized visual splendour of the detailed drawing, engraving, and painting of fashion plates fed an aspirational fantasy that ended in consumption.
Yet this fashion system paradoxically effaced many of the women on whom it depended. Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of women as victims of fashion, Behind the Seams tells a more complicated story. Hiner's close examination reveals the productive women workers, writers, and artists who achieved agency, influence, and active careers even as their work and lives were masked by the ways in which they were mythologized in popular culture, rendered anonymous, and marginalized by institutional exclusion.
Beautifully illustrated in colour throughout, Behind the Seams is a rich resource and essential reading for all those interested in fashion history, 19th-century French history and visual culture, and the social history of women.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Behind the Seams is gorgeously illustrated; it has the graphic appeal of a coffee table book and the scholarly heft of a sustained academic study. Hiner's wit shines through her clear, elegant prose and makes the book an enjoyable and edifying read for anyone interested in the material culture, popular press, economic history, or gender politics of nineteenth-century France. * Nineteenth-Century French Studies * Richly illustrated with vivid full colour reproductions ... Hiner deserves great credit for illuminating the lives of these women in this striking book. ... [She] has expertly crafted an analysis which challenges the traditional view of women's work in the nineteenth century. * Cultural and Social History * Susan Hiner's innovative study uncovers the invisible world of the women at the heart of the French fashion industry in the nineteenth century... She truly takes us behind the seams of hidden women's work by providing the reader with otherwise forgotten historical documents. This book is essential for those interested in nineteenth-century cultural history and women's roles in nineteenth-century society, and for those studying class and gender ideologies in this period. * French Studies * This outstanding study, rich in newly discovered archival materials, illuminates the pathways to professionalization forged by skilled women hatmakers, journalists, and illustrators... Brilliant analyses by Hiner, one of today's leading fashion scholars, make this beautifully illustrated book a must-read. * Heidi Brevik-Zender, University of California, Riverside, USA * Hiner's beautifully illustrated book takes us behind the shop windows and into the workshops, salons and studios of the women who made Paris fashion famous in the nineteenth century ... A must read for everyone interested in the hidden histories of fashion. * Alison Matthews David, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada * An original and significant contribution to our understanding of women's lives in 19th-century France. * Valerie Steele, Museum at FIT, USA * This beautifully illustrated volume explores the hidden work of women who produced or promoted female fashion in nineteenth-century France. With astute readings of text and image Hiner uncovers, in fascinating detail, a different reality beneath the frothy glamour of silk and lace. * Anne Green, King's College London, UK *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 247 mm
Breite: 190 mm
Dicke: 15 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-350-33979-8 (9781350339798)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Susan Hiner is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College working at the intersection of literature, visual culture, and cultural history of women. She is the author of Accessories to Modernity (2010) and numerous articles pertaining to nineteenth-century French culture. She was awarded an NEH grant for 2016-17 to advance her new book Behind the Seams.
Autor*in
Vassar College, USA
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Behind the Seams
1. Veiling Women's Work
2. Fashion's Fingers: Immodest Modistes
3. Fashion's Voices: Modistes des Lettres
4. Fashion's Eyes: Painting in the Mirror
Epilogue: Midinettes in Motion
Bibliography
Index
