The Fashion Businessadvantage. Added to this, the salaries of working women were so meagre
that, without family support in the city, many were driven to support
themselves through prostitution.^35 Anton Corbin argues that with the
Haussmannization of Paris the prostitute emerged from the shadows and
circulated tirelessly in the city of spectacle. Alongside the world exhibitions
and the shop windows of the new department stores the prostitute in turn
came to show herself, as the commodity form was indissolubly linked to its
image.^36 In the 1900 Paris Exhibition this connection was explicit in the
section devoted to theatre which was in the Rue de Paris and which became
the main centre for soliciting at the exhibition.^37 Already by the 1880s, Corbin
argues, ‘the prostitute... had become woman as spectacle. She paraded or
exhibited herself on the terraces of high-class cafes, in the brasseries, in the
café-concerts, and on the sidewalk... in this way... the primacy of the
visual in sexual solicitation originated.^38
Corbin has also described how, within the brothels, sexual practices became
more elaborate, and more staged. Spectacles and tableaux vivants were
enacted on gigantic revolving turntables, simple peepholes were replaced by
draperies, mirrors, binoculars and acoustic horns hidden in the wall;
prostitutes were required to perform a greater range of activities. What had
previously been perceived as aristocratic tastes were now lower- and middle-
class spectacles. Contemporary descriptions of brothels reveal fantasy settings
not dissimilar to those of department stores, and it was not uncommon for
brothels to renovate their establishments for each universal exhibition: opera
settings, oriental scenes, Louis XV salons, and ‘electric fairylands’.^39 For
Baudelaire the prostitute was the key figure of modernity because she was,
in Benjamin’s phrase, ‘commodity and seller in one’.^40 ‘As a dialectical image,
she “synthesises” the form of the commodity and the content’,^41 and although
Benjamin’s comments about women in general may reveal his own ambival-
- Wilson, Elizabeth, the Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and
Women, London: Virago, 1991, pp. 49–50. - Corbin, Alain, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France After 1850,
Cambridge Mass: trans. Alan Sheridan, Harvard University Press, 1990. - Jullian, Philippe, The Triumph of Art Nouveau: the Paris Exhibition of 1900, London:
Phaidon Press, 1974, p. 175. - Corbin, Alain, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France After 1850,
Cambridge Mass: trans. Alan Sheridan, Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 205. - Ibid., pp. 123–5.
- Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project,
Cambridge, Mass. & London , England: MIT Press, 1989. References in this article are to the
paperback edition, 1991, pp. 184. - Ibid.