Paris, Capital of Fashion

Valerie Steele, Valerie Steele

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350102958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño de moda

Paris, Capital of Fashion accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum at FIT, New York's only museum dedicated solely to the art of fashion. This lavishly-illustrated book is edited by MFIT's director and chief curator, Valerie Steele, also the author of the acclaimed Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. This new book opens with an important essay on how and why Paris became famous as the international "capital of fashion." Steele traces how the mythic "aura" of Paris fashion was constructed over generations, as the splendour of the court at Versailles came to be echoed by the spectacle of the haute couture. Yet Paris has faced repeated challenges from other fashion capitals, especially London, Milan, and New York. Essays by Christopher Breward, David Gilbert, Grazia d'Annunzio, and Antonia Finnane place Paris within a broader global narrative, while Sophie Kurkdjian investigates the cultural value of the Parisian couture, and Agnès Rocomora explores the online imagery of the chic Parisienne. As The New Yorker recently put it, Paris is "the most glamorous and competitive of the world's fashion capitals." No other city has been branded "Fashion" as Paris has. By opening the study of Paris fashion to new approaches, this book explains why Paris still retains its position as the world's undisputed fashion capital.

1.1: Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. Advertising campaign for the 1987/1988 fall/winter haute couture collection with Ines de la Fressange. Photo by Karl Lagerfeld, © Chanel. This dress is called l’ile enchanté (the enchanted island), a name that evokes the first great festivals given at Versailles by Louis XIV in May 1664. It was also the first collaboration between Molière and Lully.

CHAPTER ONE

Paris, “Capital of Fashion”

Valerie Steele

“Paris once again the world’s undisputed fashion capital,” declared the headline of an internationally syndicated newspaper article.¹ However, contemporaneously, the Global Language Monitor, which measures the media impact of events, reported: “In another close battle between New York and Paris, New York took four of the five categories to take the Top Global Fashion Capitals crown for 2017.”² Yet, according to The New Yorker, there was “angst about Paris at New York Fashion Week,” because several of New York City’s “most prominent” designers had defected to Paris, “the most glamorous and competitive of the world’s fashion capitals.”³

Journalists today clearly expect that members of the public will be familiar with the term “fashion capital.” But when and how was this expression forged? A search for the phrase capitale de la mode in the Gallica database of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and other French databases revealed dozens of references to the capital of fashion or fashions or new fashions or feminine fashions, as well as variants, such as center, city, cradle, and homeland of fashion(s).⁴ The earliest references, of which there are only a few, date from the eighteenth century, such as a definition of “capital” in Le Journal des sçavans (1755):

A Capital is formed in the same way as a City in a Province, with this difference, that the biggest Landowners live in the Capital; that the sovereign Government makes its residence there and from there dispenses the Revenues of the State; . . . and finally that a Capital is the center of fashions that all the Provinces take as models.⁵ [emphasis added]

Fashion has played an important role in the French historical narrative over the past 350 years, from the court of Louis XIV to the spectacle of the haute couture today. By tracing across time the idea of a fashion capital, I unexpectedly discovered a new way to explore the history of Paris fashion and its evolving significance in the cultural imagination. “What makes the capital the capital is the concentration of power,” explains the French historian Daniel Roche, power being defined politically, economically, and culturally.⁶ Paris has been the cultural and economic capital of France for centuries, and has usually, although not always, been the political capital.⁷ The extent to which France has exerted “soft power” over other nations has varied considerably over time.

However, in addition to its reputation as the capital of fashion, Paris has often been described as the capital of revolution, the capital of modernity, the capital of art, and the capital of pleasure, not to mention the capital of the nineteenth century. According to the French historian Patrice Higonnet, Paris is “a city of myths,” and myths “give birth to other myths.”⁸ A myth, in this sense, is not simply fantasy (or propaganda); it bears some relation to material reality. After all, Paris really has played a very important, perhaps unique, role in the history of fashion, just as it has in the history of world revolution. On the other hand, a myth is not factually true in the same way as a statement like “Paris is the capital of France.” Myths entail the interpretation of events, often after the fact, whether the “event” is the rise of the haute couture or the fall of the Bastille.

From Royal Splendor to the Spectacle of the Haute Couture

Already by the seventeenth century, French fashion and luxury goods had achieved international prestige, in part because they were heavily promoted by the French state. In 1673, for example, the Mercure Gallant argued that “Nothing pleases more than the fashions born in France, and . . . everything made there has a certain air that foreigners cannot give to their works.”⁹ Notice the organic and, perhaps, aristocratic metaphor: “fashions born in France.” Notice also: There is no mention of Paris, although the city was already the site of a luxury clothing industry and a fashion-forward population.¹⁰ In the mid-eighteenth century, we read again: “They say that France is the cradle of fashion.”¹¹

By 1857, however, the Popular Encyclopedia proudly stated: “Paris has been the capital of fashion for three centuries. Since the time of Louis XIV, Parisian adornments had as tributaries all the courts of Europe.”¹² Here we see a foundation myth in the process of creation, mixing historical facts with hindsight and hyperbole. Other relevant information is ignored, such as the fact that Louis XIV disliked Paris and the Parisians, and that in 1682, he moved the royal court to Versailles, where it remained until 1789.

The splendor of the court at Versailles undoubtedly contributed greatly to the establishment of French fashion leadership, especially since Louis XIV strategically utilized fashion as an element of his political and economic policy. In many respects, the court (la Cour) and the city (la Ville) were two opposed worlds. However, the “Société de Cour” included both Versailles and Paris, as the nobility occupied both spaces. As Montesquieu observed: “A woman who leaves Paris to spend six months in the country comes back as antiquated as if she had been forgotten there for thirty years.”¹³ Paris and Versailles were so closely intertwined that they formed, I would argue, a double-headed fashion capital. It was not just a question of fashion leadership, but also of fashion production, since with the exception of silk textiles, which were primarily woven in Lyons, most French fashions were produced and sold in Paris—and even the Lyonnais silk merchants made research trips to Paris to see the latest styles.¹⁴ In his intriguingly titled book, Paris, modèle des nations étrangers (1777), Louis-Antoine Caraccioli writes:

There is not a Court in Europe where French fabrics are not à la mode. They flatte...