The Fashion BusinessWhile nineteenth-century Paris gave middle-class women new opportunities
for consumption of fashionable goods, it also saw the origins of a more elite
form of contemporary fashion, haute couture.This was, and still is, the only
branch of fashion to be exclusively female (there is no couture for men), and
although it was available to comparatively few women it gradually set the
tone for fashionable consumption across a broader spectrum of consumers.^32
In the process, however, of fashionable consumption, be it in the department
store or the couture house, women of all classes were themselves spectacular-
ized; caught up in the web of images they sought to consume, they themselves
became image. Increasingly the nineteenth-century ‘dream world’ became
epitomized in the spectacle of woman, with her links to fashion and the city,
in the figures of the Parisian woman of fashion, the shop girl, waitress or
milliner, the prostitute, even the dummies in shop windows, and the allegorical
figures of sculpture.^33 The main entrance to the 1900 exhibition, at the Porte
Binet, a monumental gateway on the Place de la Concorde, was surmounted
by a 15-foot tall polychrome plaster statue of La Parisienne, whose robe
was designed by the couturier Paquin. The sculptor, Moreau-Vauthier,
subsequently specialized in small bronze figurines of Parisian ladies of fashion,
generally dressed in Paquin gowns, which would be exhibited in the ladies’
salons. However at the time the original statue was unveiled in 1900 it
attracted both ridicule and harsh criticism for the connotations of prostitution
which contemporaries saw in its dress and demeanour. Their response
highlighted the ambiguous and uneasy relationship of woman to spectacle
in this period, particularly the slippage between the woman of fashion, the
prostitute and the actress, confirming Mica Nava’s point that spectacular
fashion is an unstable sign. One could also make a connection here to Andreas
Huyssen’s formulation of mass culture as feminine at a later period in the
twentieth century, the inter-war years.^34
For women, in particular, modernity was a double-coded experience, in
which euphoria was juxtaposed with alienation, autonomy with objectifica-
tion. While the middle-class woman was relatively safe in the department
store the working woman was prey to any importunity, and the instability
of fashion as a sign could work equally to her disadvantage as to her
- Marly, Diana de, Worth: Father of Haute Couture, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980.
De Marly argues that Worth had, by the 1870s, initiated many of the business and bureaucratic
practices which would, in the twentieth century, define a couture house. - For example, see Jullian, Philippe, The Triumph of Art Nouveau: the Paris Exhibition
of 1900, London: Phaidon Press, 1974, p. 169, for a discussion of the allegorical figure of
electricity at the 1900 Paris exhibition. - Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. See chapter on ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’.