Paris gave middle-class women new opportunities for consumption of fashionable goods

While nineteenth-century Paris gave middle-class women new opportunities for consumption of fashionable goods, it also saw the origins of a more elite form of contemporary fashion, haute couture. This was, and still is, the only branch of fashion to be exclusively female (there is no couture for men), and although it was available to comparatively few women it gradually set the tone for fashionable consumption across a broader spectrum of consumers.32 In the process, however, of fashionable consumption, be it in the department store or the couture house, women

All classes were themselves spectacular zed; caught up in the web of images they sought to consume, they themselves became image. Increasingly the nineteenth-century ‘dream world’ became epitomized in the spectacle of woman, with her links to fashion and the city, in the figures of the Parisian woman of fashion, the shop girl, waitress or milliner, the prostitute, even the dummies in shop windows, and the allegorical figures of sculpture.33

The main entrance to the 1900 exhibition, at the Porte Benet, a monumental gateway on the Place de la Concorde, was surmounted by a 15-foot tall polychrome plaster statue of La Parisians, whose robe was designed by the couturier Piquing. The sculptor, Moreau-Gauthier, subsequently specialized in small bronze figurines of Parisian ladies of fashion, generally dressed in Piquing gowns, which would be exhibited in the ladies’ salons. However at the time the original statue was unveiled in 1900 it attracted both ridicule and harsh criticism for the connotations of prostitution which contemporaries saw in its dress and demeanor.

Lastly comment

Their response highlighted the ambiguous and uneasy relationship of woman to spectacle in this period, particularly the slippage between the woman of fashion, the prostitute and the actress, confirming Mica Nava’s point that spectacular fashion is an unstable sign. One could also make a connection here to Andreas Hussein’s formulation of mass culture as feminine at a later period in the twentieth century, the inter-war years.34