Moving through Fashion in 19th-Century France

Since the1850s, when French poet Charles Baudelaire made explicit the link between “la mode” and “la modernité,’ theories of fashion have focused primarily on its temporal rhythms. In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin, for one, inspired by the poet, reflects extensively on fashion’s relation to time, and especially to newness, “the mould from which modernity is cast”. Returning to that same historical place and time when fashion asserted a central role in the modern cultural imagination – mid-nineteenth-century Paris – in this paper I look at the relations between fashion and space, and more specifically the way that fashion mediates the (social) body in space. To this end, I examine changing silhouettes in female fashion from the 1840s-1880s and their impact on the way the female body negotiated space both indoors and out of doors.

The period in question coincides with the invention and emergence of the new industry of “haute couture” in Paris, a development which invited countless aesthetic and moral reflections on the space that fashion occupied in women’s lives, the social and physical space that women inhabited, and the way fashion choreographed women’s bodies in motion. To illustrate these various points, I refer to poetry, essays, fashion illustrations, caricatures and paintings of the time.