Feminine Excess at the Palais-Royal 1921

La Gazette du Bon Ton was “published in November 1912, and from this date until its demise in 1925 the magazine set the standard for elegance and luxury in the fashion press” (Davis 48). The magazine embodied the heightened emphasis on luxury of the time period and prided itself on “elegance and exclusivity” (Davis 48). Parisiennes seeking luxury and excess paid a hefty price for a monthly subscription to the magazine, ensuring exclusivity of readership (Davis 50). Lucien Vogel, a friend of Paul Poiret, was the man who started the magazine and he placed particular emphasis on class-based notions of elitist fashion (48). His goal for the magazine was to equate fashion with art, aligning it with the three beaux-arts (49). Vogel had considerable connections within the fashion market at the time and he was well respected, allowing the fashions featured in the Gazette to be exclusive to his magazine only (50). He further established exclusive contracts with seven of Paris’s most established couture houses: Cheruit, Doeuillet, Doucet, Paquin, Poiret, Redfern, and Worth (50). The early fashion magazine’s pages were “produced on fine paper and illustrated with exquisite hand- colored plates, [presenting] a highly stylized take on up-to-date fashion that was both witty and worldly” (48).

This particular fashion plate was illustrated by Pierre Mourgue and can be found in the third issue of the Gazette du Bon Ton from the year 1921. The plate includes a short description reading, “La promenade du Palais-Royal”, which translates to “The Palais-Royal Garden Walk (or stroll)” in English. As noted in the Table of Contents of the magazine, the illustration does not correspond with any other text (“hors texte” or ‘without text’). Beneath the fashion plate’s short description are the words, ‘Redingote Directoire,’ describing the dress featured in the illustration. These minimal textual descriptions of the image are all the reader has to go by; the rest of the interpretation relies on visual cues alone. The actual illustration consists of the image of a woman wearing a long, silver coat and a coal-scuttle bonnet. She is leaning on what appears to be a black, closed umbrella and looking in the direction of her lean. Her hand is on her hip and her feet are crossed at the bottom of her stance, giving her a relaxed look. She wears high heels and the accents of her appearance are a bright red, which can be seen in the details of her bonnet, her finger-nail polish, and her shoes. Surrounding the woman are trees without leaves, signifying a winter/spring season (April, according to the bottom righthand corner) in the photo. In the background are interconnected elaborate buildings shaded in with a bright purple colour. There is an enclosed space behind the woman that is green, indicating a garden space enclosed by a fence and surrounded by a walkway on which the woman is standing.

The most prominent aspect of this illustration, however, is the silver appliqué detail on the woman’s coat and the tips of her shoes. The silver outlines the majority of her coat and gives the coat life and shape. The appliqué sparkles and gleams in the light and gives this fashion plate an air of luxury and expense.

During the nineteenth century, cultural and social attitudes surrounding acceptable forms of both masculinity and femininity were shifting (Breward 147). Whereas prior to the nineteenth century sartorial indicators of class and elite social status were prominent, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a shift toward a greater variety of consumers who were able to afford and purchase fashionable styles due to the cheaper production of textiles and the rise in mass production (Breward 145-78). These innovations “helped to construct a vision of the independent female consumer that social commentators found… threatening” (161). Breward suggests that “the rise of the department store and the expansion of women’s fashion magazines, both designed to serve all classes, undoubtedly transformed and ‘modernized’ the culture and consumption of dress in the second half of the century” (166). Femininity came to be inextricably linked to consumption and, further, Breward argues that, “consumption itself became a substitute for being bourgeois” (169).

Important, then, to my analysis of this Pierre Mourgue fashion plate is the location that is depicted. The woman appears to be strolling through the Palais-Royal in Paris.

Located across the street from the infamous Louvre museum, the Palais-Royal was commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in 1639 and was later home to royalty after his death (SmarterParis). The Palais-Royal saw a decline in social milieu when France’s government was located there and royal focus shifted to the palace of Versailles and Saint-Cloud (SmarterParis). In 1780, Louis Philippe II “expanded and redesigned the buildings and gardens and opened up the arcades to the public as a shopping and entertainment complex” (SmarterParis). Along with this re-established social popularity, the Palais-Royal became a frequent stomping ground for gamblers and prostitutes (SmarterParis). So what does the location of this fashion plate tell us about the woman in the illustration?

To begin, she is featured in this fashion plate presumably taking a stroll through the Palais-Royal gardens.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were expected to show their wealth through fashionable and expensive clothing, but femininity was also “associated with a narrow definition of “‘home’ and home life” (Breward 164). Women were chastised as being dangerous consumers of excess and luxury, but if a woman did not express in outward form her social status in the “public masculine world,” she was considered to be failing in her feminine role (Breward 164). A central contradiction arises here. The woman shown in this fashion plate is walking through the gardens of the Palais-Royale in the new fashions of the day, giving off an impression of her social status and prestige. Breward further discusses that, “any middle-class woman who ventured into a public space unaccompanied and dressed fashionably… risked slander and ostracism as a virtual prostitute” (165). Accordingly, then, the woman depicted in this fashion plate paints a picture of problematic femininity. Both her location and the fact that she is dressed fashionably in public without the presence of a man allude to the notion that she is a woman lacking virtue.

This negative portrayal of femininity is further exemplified through the implications of consumerism and luxury within this plate. Breward suggests that the fashion journal stood at the center of the validation “that femininity had become an agent of commerce” (169). Torre et al. suggest that through fashion plates, “fashionable women were expected to identify with an alluring graphic image, propelling them to the salon or the emporium that promised to realize that image” (12).

The image of femininity portrayed in this plate alludes to wealth and leisure on several levels. The woman clearly has the leisure time to stroll through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, showing off her latest outfit and proving her upper class status as a woman who does not need to sit at home performing traditional feminine household duties because she can afford a housekeeper or a maid. The woman is also dressed in the latest fashions, signifying that she has the money to keep up with current fashions. The coat that Mourgue represents her in is pictured as extravagant due to the silver, sparkling applique and, moreover, is a redingote style jacket, which was a men’s riding coat adapted for female wear during the late 18th century. This woman resembles the iconic twentieth century “‘Gibson Girl’, a creation of caricature who encapsulated the new economic power wielded by the rich [couture] buyer” in America (Breward 186). Here, she is represented in a subdued position, depicted as a virtueless woman similar to the prostitutes who used to wander the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Her likeness has been represented by a male artist attempting to sell clothing to a female that inherently possessed “the excessive desire to consume” (Jones n.p.). Perhaps in light of this analysis we can view this woman from a more positive perspective, one of empowerment rather than of submission.

She could alternatively be pictured as an independent woman who “embodied new definitions of gender and lifestyle” (Craik, as cited by Breward 186). Perhaps the idea of the new, independent woman threatened nineteenth and early twentieth century men, leading them to foster ideologies that portrayed women as unstoppable consumers. Fashion magazines at the time worked to promote and encourage these notions and, arguably, still do today.

 

 

Discussion Question: Are there other ways of doing a semiotic analysis of this fashion plate? What other conclusions may we perhaps come to when looking at this plate in another light?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Breward, Christopher. The Culture of Fashion. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Print.

Davis, Mary E. “La Gazette Du Bon Ton.” Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2008. 48-92. Print.

Jones, Jennifer. “Coquettes and Grisettes.” The Berg Fashion Library (2004): n. pag. Web. 17 April 2016.

Mourgue, Pierre. La Promenade Du Palais-Royal. 1921. Fashion plate. Royal Ontario Museum Library and Archives, Toronto, Canada.

SmarterParis. Palais Royal. SmarterParis City Guide, n.d. Web. 17 April 2016. URL: http://www.smarterparis.com/reviews/palais-royal/

Torre, Rosemary and Koda, Harold. 20^th-Century Fashion Illustration: The Feminine Ideal. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2011. Print.