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“This is an original, gracefully written study of Paris fashion, one that manages to say as much about national character, in a sense, as it does about the rise and fall of hemlines. . . . I would not only recommend it to anyone interested in the psychology of clothes, but to anyone planning a sejour in France – as much required reading, say, as the Green Guides of Michelin.” ―Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Steele's] book offers many insights and pleasures, including some excellent quotations.” ―The New York Times
“An impressive compendium of information.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“Anne Hollander, Valerie Steele, and Bill Cunningham are members of a small band of American critics and scholars now writing and talking about fashion with knowledge of the business, the craft and the art. They know its history and its meaning . . . . Above all they respect their profession and grant it due importance.” ―Dress: Journal of the Costume Society of America
“A mine of novel information and fascinating illustrations, Valerie Steele's book is good to look at and good to read.” ―Eugen Weber
“An innovative renewal of a subject all too often explored ploddingly. Ms. Steele enhances brilliantly the eternal appeal of French couture.” ―Palmer White, author of Schiaparelli
“Once I started reading, I could not stop! Valerie Steele's book is wonderfully witty, pleasurable to read and so well documented. It is one of the best complete studies on Paris fashion that I have ever come across.” ―Jean-Michel Tuchscherer, Former Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Steele's book is a richly textured analysis of sources - artistic, economic, literary, social, and it is a perfect book to recommend to students and many others beside.” ―Costume
About the Author
Valerie Steele is the Director of The Museum, at the Fashion Institute of Technology
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Paris has been the international capital of style for three hundred years. Although challenged by other fashion cities such as Milan, London and New York, Paris remains special. This fascinating book shows that the strength of the French fashion industry rests on the depth and sophistication of its fashion culture. Revised and updated, Paris Fashion is reprinted here in paperback for the first time. More than just a history of famous designers and changing styles, the book is about fashion as a cultural ideal and a social phenomenon. By focusing on a 'case study' of Paris, Steele provides brilliant insights into the significance of fashion in modern urban society.
The author, an
internationally recognized authority on the history of fashion, is
the author of many books, including Fashion and Eroticism, Women of
Fashion: 20th-Century Designers, Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power,
and Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now.
Books of The Times; 'Paris Fashion,' Clothes as Extension of Culture
By John Gross
Published: March 29,
1988
Paris Fashion A
Cultural History By Valerie Steele Illustrated. 317 pages. Oxford
University Press.
Paris and fashion
have been so closely associated for so long that the link between
them must sometimes seem like a fact of nature. But of course it
isn't; and in ''Paris Fashion'' Valerie Steele has set out to analyze
the phenomenon in terms of social values and culture.
How did Paris
acquire its supremacy as the international capital of style, and why,
in spite of its relative decline, has it been able to retain such a
commanding position? In searching for an explanation, Ms. Steele has
found herself writing, as she says, ''a study of ideas about
fashion'' rather than ''a history of the fashion industry as such.''
Her answer, briefly,
is that Paris fashion has flourished because Paris has had a more
sophisticated and more highly developed ''fashion culture'' than any
comparable metropolitan center. In a book that calls itself a
cultural history, that may sound like a piece of circular reasoning;
but by the time you have finished reading her, it is hard not to
agree.
Nowhere else were
new styles so paraded and so appreciated as they were in 18th-century
and 19th-century Paris; nowhere else did fashion have such prestige,
or generate such an institutional life of its own, or maintain such
friendly connections with the other, less ephemeral arts. It is
reasons such as these that account for the triumph of Parisian
couture, rather than supposedly unique qualities of invention and
craftsmanship.
To account for the
fashion culture itself you would virtually have to write a cultural
history of France, to explore parallels in other areas (haute cuisine
is perhaps the most obvious one) and delve deeper into the general
history of taste. But that would be to undertake more than a single
book could hope to encompass, except at a superficial level.
As it is, Ms. Steele
has achieved some heroic feats of compression, though without
clogging her narrative. The story goes back a long way, at least as
far as 15th-century Burgundy (''chic black,'' for example, first made
its appearance among ''individual Burgundian and Italian dandies who
were in the process of renouncing the gay colors of the late Middle
Ages''); and at every stage the argument is buttressed with case
histories and anecdotes.
The 80 or so
illustrations make an important contribution, too. They are not only
well chosen but well integrated into the text, and the art of
portraying fashion is itself discussed in illuminating detail.
There is a
particularly valuable account of the evolution of the fashion plate,
from the 18th century onward. It takes in such topics as the
neglected achievements of the Colin sisters, outstanding fashion
illustrators in the middle years of the 19th century; the
international impact of magazines of the same period like Le Moniteur
de la Mode, which had eight foreign editions (American, British,
German, Russian, Belgian, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese); and the
Art Deco fashion plates of artists like Paul Iribe and Georges
Barbier, which not only reflected the radically new styles of the
years before World War I, but also influenced their development.
Men's clothes as
well as women's find a place in the book, most arrestingly in a
chapter on Baudelaire, who began as a romantic dandy and gradually
turned toward the more austere dandyism of dressing entirely in black
- on the face of it, something not so very different from the
conventional bourgeois garb of the time. (I hadn't realized until
reading Ms. Steele that he designed all his clothes himself.) If
Baudelaire is the only poet to figure significantly in ''Paris
Fashion,'' two chapters center on the work of major novelists.
Balzac, who early in his career wrote a ''Treatise on the Elegant
Life,'' may not have practiced what he preached (he was notoriously
slovenly in his personal appearance), but Ms. Steele demonstrates
that in his fiction he was both an accurate historian of fashion and
a keen student of its symbolism. So, in a more subtle way, was
Proust, and we are given a good deal of interesting information about
both the clothes his characters wear and the couturiers mentioned in
his work.
Most of the
couturiers, apart from the Italian-born Mariano Fortuny, are only
dimly remembered today. Even Mme. Paquin, who presided over more than
2,000 employees in her heyday, barely rates a mention in most fashion
histories (although Ms. Steele might have added that she has achieved
literary immortality of sorts: there is a reference to her in a
much-quoted passage in Ezra Pound's ''Pisan Cantos'').
One result of her
research into the careers of figures like Mme. Paquin has been to
persuade Ms. Steele - and she persuades the reader in turn -that
women have played a much greater role in the history of fashion as
designers than the textbooks give them credit for. But she isn't out
to prove a simple thesis, feminist or otherwise; and without playing
down the extent to which fashion is shaped by wider social forces,
she insists that it also has a dynamic of its own.
Only at the end, I
think, does she falter: she doesn't really put forward an adequate
explanation of how Parisian fashion managed to make such a fighting
comeback after World War II. But it's a complicated subject, one that
needs more space than she can give it here, and it would be nice to
see her returning to it another time.
Meanwhile her book
offers many insights and pleasures, including some excellent
quotations. I cherish the summing up by a rival designer of the
Chanel look, popularly supposed to have been inspired by ''the simple
dress of the working girl,'' as ''deluxe poverty,'' and to anyone who
takes a sternly disapproving view of fashion as a whole, I commend a
reflection of Jean Cocteau: ''Fashion dies very young, so we must
forgive it everything.''
Valerie Steele
(Ph.D., Yale University) is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum
at the Fashion Institute of Technology (MFIT). She has curated more
than 20 exhibitions in the past ten years, including Gothic: Dark
Glamour; Love & War: The Weaponized Woman; The Corset: Fashioning
the Body; London Fashion; and Femme Fatale: Fashion in Fin-de-Siècle
Paris.
Editor-in-chief of
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture (Berg
Publishers), which she founded in 1997, Dr. Steele is also the author
of numerous books, including Gothic: Dark Glamour; The Corset: A
Cultural History; Paris Fashion; Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to
Now; Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power; and Women of Fashion:
20th-Century Designers. She was editor-in-chief of the three-volume
Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Her latest book was Isabel
Toledo: Fashion from the Inside Out, which she co-authored with
Patricia Mears, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name.
She is currently working on a book and exhibition, Japan Fashion Now.
Dr. Steele lectures
frequently and has appeared on many television programs, including
The Oprah Winfrey Show and Undressed: The Story of Fashion. After she
appeared on the PBS special, The Way We Wear, she was described in
The Washington Post as one of “fashion’s brainiest women.”
Often quoted in media, she was herself the subject of profiles in
Forbes: “Fashion Professor” and in The New York Times:
“High-Heeled Historian,” as well as being listed in the New York
Daily News “Fashion’s 50 Most Powerful.”
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