Prêt-À-Porter, Paris and Women

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume - Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women - situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy. Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines - alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs - demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68. By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

Alexis Romano is a scholar of dress, design history and visual culture. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and is co-founder of the Fashion Research Network. She holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and was the 2020-21 Curatorial Fellow at The Met's Costume Institute.

List of Illustrations 1. Introduction 2. Critiquing the Everyday: Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women in Magazines, 1945-1968 3. Branding Prêt-à-Porter in the Fourth Republic (1946-1958): Modernisation, Cultural Diplomacy and Industry Debates 4. Displaying Industrial Modernity in 1950s Elle: Readymade Dress, Rational Space and Women 5. Negotiating the Avant-Garde in the 1960s: Stylisme, Industry Debates and Restless Images 6. Expanding the Urban Fabric in the 1960s: Redefined Bodies, Dress and City Space 7. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index