Accessories to modernity : fashion and the feminine in nineteenth-century France / Susan Hiner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hiner, Susan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clothing and dress--France--History--19th century.

Clothing and dress.

Fashion--France--History--19th century.

Fashion.

Women--France--History--19th century.

Women.

France--Social life and customs--19th century.

France.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 281 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period. As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman's paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it. Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the "accessory" status-in terms of both complicity and subordination-of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Prologue

1. La Femme comme il (en) faut and the Pursuit of Distinction

2. Unpacking the Corbeille de mariage

3. "Cashmere Fever": Virtue and the Domestication of the Exotic

4. Mademoiselle Ombrelle: Shielding the Fair Sex

5. Fan Fetish: Gender, Nostalgia, and Commodification

6. Between Good Intentions and Ulterior Motives: The Culture of Handbags

Epilogue. The Feminine Accessory

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283898096

1283898098

9780812205336

0812205332

OCLC:

794700574