Outfitting Paris: Fashion, Space, and the Body in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
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Outfitting Paris: Fashion, Space, and the Body in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture by Kasia Stempniak Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Deborah Jenson, Supervisor ___________________________ David Bell ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot ___________________________ Jessica Tanner Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 ABSTRACT Outfitting Paris: Fashion, Space, and the Body in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture by Kasia Stempniak Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Deborah Jenson, Supervisor ___________________________ David Bell ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot ___________________________ Jessica Tanner An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 Copyright by Kasia Stempniak 2019 Abstract This dissertation argues that the literary and cultural history of nineteenth- century Paris must be re-envisaged in the context of fashion as a spatial and embodied practice. While existing scholarship has focused on the role of fashion in emerging consumer culture, I focus instead on how clothing mediated bodily and urban knowledge. With the rise of department stores, the fashion press, and textile innovations in mid-nineteenth-century France, fashion became synonymous with the modern urban experience. Concomitantly with the emergence of the modern fashion system, the city of Paris was itself refashioned through vast urbanization projects. This metropolitan redesign created new points of intersection between the dressed body and the city. I argue that writers during the Second Empire and early Third Republic reframed fashion as a form of embodied space. Balancing close readings of canonical texts, Charles Baudelaire’s “À une passante” and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, for example, with lesser known works, including Gustave Flaubert’s Le Château des cœurs and Stéphane Mallarmé’s journal La Dernière mode, alongside fashion journals and physical garments themselves, I propose that the fashioned body was inextricably tethered to conceptions of urban space in the nineteenth-century French cultural imaginary. iv Dedication For B.R. v Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. viii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... x 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Structuring the Nineteenth-Century Fashion Industry .............................................. 8 1.2 Fashion in Literature and the Press ............................................................................. 14 1.3 Theorizing Fashion ......................................................................................................... 16 1.4 The (Fashioned) Body, Gender, and Space ................................................................. 20 2. Shaping the Body: The Sartorial Silhouette in Literature and Popular Culture ............ 30 2.1 The Sartorial Silhouette ................................................................................................. 36 2.2 Fashion as a Form of Gesture ....................................................................................... 52 2.2 Consuming Space ........................................................................................................... 63 3. Dressing the City: Fashion and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Paris ................... 80 3.1 Architecture and the Sartorial Imagination ................................................................ 85 3.2 “Puisque des plis de sa robe on a pu tirer une architecture” ................................... 94 3.3 Constructing Fashion ................................................................................................... 105 3.4 Fashion and Architecture as Forms of Habitat ........................................................ 117 4. “C’est le pays de la toilette:” Sartorial Transformations in Flaubert’s Le Château des cœurs ............................................................................................................................................ 121 4.1 Fashioning the modern féerie ...................................................................................... 127 4.2 From the maison de couture to the Department Store ............................................... 140 vi 4.3 Constructing the Fashioned Body .............................................................................. 152 5. “L’invention d’un corps nouveau:” Clothing and Embodied Movement in Mallarmé’s La Dernière mode and Loïe Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance” ...................................................... 163 5.1 Embodiment and the Silhouette in La Dernière mode ............................................... 167 5.2 Loïe Fuller’s Sartorial “Écriture Corporelle” ............................................................ 177 5.3 The “Fuller” Fashion Effect ......................................................................................... 201 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 211 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 220 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 237 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Bodice by Mlles Delaporte, circa 1898. Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) Museum. ............................................................................................... 1 Figure 2: Petersham label on bodice by Mlles Delaporte. FIDM Museum. .......................... 2 Figure 3: "Une Parisienne," Émile Chatrousse. Petit Palais. ................................................. 31 Figure 4: Marble Statue of a Woman. 2nd half of the 4th century B.C. Marble, Greek. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ................................................................................................... 33 Figure 5: Cage crinoline, circa 1862. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ............................ 44 Figure 6: Afternoon dress by the Maison Clément, circa 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ............................................................................................................................................ 47 Figure 7: Bustle, circa 1882, steel and cotton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ............. 50 Figure 8: Constantin Guys (French 1802-1892), Woman with a Parasol, 1860-1865, Watercolor over pen and brown ink, 27x18.4 cm, 2003.134. The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles .................................................................................................................................. 56 Figure 9: "Manière d'utiliser les jupons nouvellement mis à la mode," Honoré Daumier, Le Charivari, April 16, 1856 ......................................................................................................... 65 Figure 10: "Plus que ça d'ballon...excusez!" Honoré Daumier, Le Charivari, June 13, 1855. The Metropolitan Museum of Art ............................................................................................ 66 Figure 11: "'M. Haussmann et Mlle Lutèce:' Paris-Comique." 1870. Paris: Capital of the 19th-Century. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. ................................ 68 Figure 12: Viollet-le-Duc, c. 1405-10, Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français, p. 283 ...... 87 Figure 13: Evening gown by Worth, 1898-1900. The Metropolitan Museum of Art ......... 95 Figure 14: Le Petit écho de la mode. February 2, 1890. ............................................................ 102 Figure 15: Charles Blanc, L'Art dans le vêtement et dans la parure, 1875, p. 77 ................... 107 Figure 16: Frontispiece in La Dernière mode illustrated by Edmond Morin ...................... 170 viii Figure 17: "Toilettes de promenades," La Dernière mode, October 4, 1874. ........................ 173 Figure 18: Le Moniteur de la mode, April 3, 1874. ................................................................... 174 Figure 19: Patent filed by Loïe Fuller for a “Garment for Dancers,” Patent No. 518.347. Washington, DC. ....................................................................................................................... 200 Figure 20: Delphos dress by Mariano Fortuny, circa 1912. Rhode Island School of Design Museum ...................................................................................................................................... 211 ix Acknowledgements I am grateful for the incredibly supportive group of scholars in my dissertation committee