The Fashion Businessarcades and the department stores, and the world of commercial sex. The
seductive imagery that defines glamour, it may be argued, was forged through
the mixing of these low and high sources. From the latter came the exotic,
bright colours (notably red), and a sleazy, vulgar element, while the former
supplied an injection of luxury balanced by good taste and refinement.^30
Sex and the theatrical mixed openly in the vibrant red-dominated posters of
Toulouse Lautrec.
The figure who symbolized the new language was the courtesan. Like the
film star of later years, the courtesan was an emblematic figure who was
recounted, evoked, described and analysed in novels like Zola’sNana,
newspapers, studies and memoirs. As a professional of illusion and make-
believe, she was a central figure in the new culture of appearances and
surfaces. At bottom a prostitute, she was also in parts actress, fashion icon,
celebrity and professional beauty. The very grandest courtesans lived in
palaces, where they were maintained by a team of wealthy sponsors eager to
pay vast sums in return for sexual favours. They lived on the margins of
respectable society, but exercised considerable influence through their liaisons
and their trend-setting role. At once vulgar and elegant, showy and fashion-
able, the courtesans captured the attention and occupied a place in the
collective imaginary. According to art historian T.J. Clark, the courtesan
was prominent because, by embracing luxury, she adopted a facade of
respectability that at least partially concealed the uneasy intersection of money
and sexuality that was such a widespread phenomenon in Paris.^31
However, if the courtesan acted as the inspiration for a new language of
allure, it took artists to give this language a concrete, reproducible form and
develop it into a recognisable trademark style of modern celebrity. Several
artists contributed to this enterprise, but none more than the Italian portrait
painter Giovanni Boldini, who painted nearly all the prominent figures to
pass through Paris between the late nineteenth century and the First World
War. Boldini is not today regarded as an important painter, but in many
ways he pioneered a type of edgy, fashionable portraiture that summed up
the Paris of the Belle Époque. He forged a new pictorial language by
combining the sensual atmosphere and bright colours of the worlds of
prostitution and popular entertainment with the conventional society
- On the mingling of theatre and consumerism in Paris, see Kracauer, Siegfried, Jacques
Offenbach and the Paris of His Times, London: Constable, 1937. On London, see Rappaport,
Erika,Shopping for Pleasure: Women and the Making of London’s West End, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000. - Clark, T.J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1990, pp. 102, 109.