1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910808504903321

Autore

Hiner Susan

Titolo

Accessories to modernity : fashion and the feminine in nineteenth-century France / / Susan Hiner

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 2010

©2010

ISBN

1-283-89809-8

0-8122-0533-2

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (viii, 281 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

391.00944/09034

Soggetti

Clothing and dress - France - History - 19th century

Fashion - France - History - 19th century

Women - France - History - 19th century

France Social life and customs 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Prologue -- 1. La Femme comme il (en) faut and the Pursuit of Distinction -- 2. Unpacking the Corbeille de mariage -- 3. "Cashmere Fever": Virtue and the Domestication of the Exotic -- 4. Mademoiselle Ombrelle: Shielding the Fair Sex -- 5. Fan Fetish: Gender, Nostalgia, and Commodification -- 6. Between Good Intentions and Ulterior Motives: The Culture of Handbags -- Epilogue. The Feminine Accessory -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period. As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming



confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman's paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it. Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the "accessory" status-in terms of both complicity and subordination-of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.