Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in 19th-Century France

(Paperback)

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In this highly original book, Susan E. Hiner looks behind fashions 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 womens 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 womens 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. Hiners 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.

Author Bio

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.