John Galliano: Modernity and Spectacledisplay and parade. While Haussmann’s rebuilding had broken up the old
Parisian working-class communities, who were henceforth pushed out
towards the newer, industrial suburbs, new inhabitants continued to flood
into Paris. New service industries flourished, providing jobs for women as
waitresses, shop assistants, seamstresses, laundresses, hairdressers, servants,
and milliners. Many of these women were new to Paris, without the support
of friends or family. In the absence of the old certainties of class and
community, in this new space of uncertainty, anyone could pretend to be
anything if they had the money to buy clothes.^27 Surface was full of meaning;
fashion and dress became vitally important as a way of signalling an identity,
but also of reading one.
The Parisian arcades on which Walter Benjamin based his study date from
the first half of the nineteenth century,^28 and housed a variety of luxury
shops, clubs and, later, brothels which created a model of consumption later
in the century for the Paris of the Second Empire. In the second half of the
century the department store in particular played a vital role in offering
middle-class women the possibility of mapping out an identity through their
patterns of consumption. Shopping became a leisure activity, as the depart-
ment store gave middle-class women new opportunities to stroll, to enjoy, to
contemplate, to observe, come and go, the same opportunities afforded in
the city space to the Baudelairean figure of the male flâneur. Janet Wolff has
argued that they opened up a space for the woman as flâneuse.^29 Mica Nava
has argued that modernity gave female consumers a way of being ‘at home’
in the chaos, the maelstrom, of city life, and becoming the subjects as well as
the objects of modernization.^30 Nava argues that middle-class women were
not so much left out of the spaces of modernity, as Janet Wolff had claimed,
as excluded from the story by historians of modernity. For Nava fashion,
men’s and women’s, presumably, was important in modernity precisely
because of the emphasis of both on the instability of the sign. Dress signified
‘rank’ but also ‘choice’ and ‘identity’ – and she contends that ‘women played
a crucial part in the development of these taxonomies of signification’.^31
- T.J. Clark, ibid., p. 47.
- Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, Cambridge Mass & London England: trans.
Howard Eiland & Kevin McLauchlin, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. - Wolff, Janet, ‘The invisible flâneuse: women and the literature of modernity’ in Feminine
Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Cambridge England: Polity Press, 1990. - Nava, Mica, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’ in
Pasi Falk & Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 66. - Nava, Mica, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’ in
Pasi Falk & Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 66.