Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion

Abstract

As Elizabeth L. Block argues in Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion, later nineteenth-century French fashion often is understood through the lens of its designer or fashion house. Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, this is the House of Worth, as in publications by Diana de Marly, JoAnne Olian, Elizabeth A. Coleman, or Amy de la Haye and Valerie D. Mendes, with Block herself having previously turned this lens towards Maison F elix. Alternatively, some studies approach the subject through representations of garments in visual media such as paintings and fashion plates, in the writing by Justine De Young or literary and cultural studies, or through a consideration of the makers themselves, as in works by Susan Hiner. In Dressing Up, Block claims for herself a different approach, one focused on the wealthy US women who were significant consumers. Hence the book’s subtitle: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion. Given this focus, the reader might anticipate chapters organized around specific women as case studies. And Brock does indeed inform the reader about the lived experiences, consumer knowledge, and choices of women such as Caroline Astor or Cornelia Bradley-Martin. Yet the book itself is not solely concerned with designer houses or retailers, garments, or consumers but instead with the circulation patterns in which all of these participated. While the volume’s title appears to promise details of women’s lives, the lives of garments are its focus, in fact. Indeed, in the introduction and conclusion to the volume, Block charges both the reader and seemingly herself to “follow the dresses” (4, 211). Thankfully, Block answers the call and in so doing presents the reader with a different, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying story. The narrative begins with an introduction to its players, the “Midcentury Tastemakers.” Again, by title, one might assume these to include figures such as an Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane. Instead, the stage is set with milliners, dressmakers, various other classes of artisans, fashion publications, importers, and dry goods and department stores. Through these agents, US women 2 See Justine De Young, Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775–1925 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); Susan Hiner in Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and her forthcoming, Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Bloomsbury). 1 Diana de Marly, Worth: Father of Haute Couture (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980); JoAnne Olian, The House of Worth: The Gilded Age (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1982); Elizabeth A. Coleman, The Opulent Era: Fashions of Worth, Doucet, and Pingat (New York: Thames and Hudson (Brooklyn Museum of Art), 1989); Amy de la Haye and Valerie D. Mendes, The House of Worth, 1890–1914: Portrait of an Archive (London: V&A Publishing, 2014); and Elizabeth L. Block, “Maison F elix and the Body Types of its Clients, 1875–1900,” West 86: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 26, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2019): 80–103.