Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.76 (848 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0812242599 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-03-31 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Moving the Marginalized to the Center Lisa R. George In her fascinating new book, Dr Susan Hiner examines women's fashion accessories in 19th century France as signifiers of social and political status: "As cultural signs of identity (class, race, gender), these accessories become vital documents in the construction of modernity itself" (Hiner p. 4). By moving previously marginalized women's fashion accessories to the center of her discussion, Hiner demonstrates how the items found in the corbeille de mariage, the wedding gift basket, "institutionalized certain goods--silks, cashmere, shawls, jewelry, lace, fans--as indices of respectability," (p.5) since these luxury it. "While this covers mostly mid 19th century accessories, there" according to CYNTHIA ABEL. While this covers mostly mid 19th century accessories, there is information on their late 18th-early 19th century origins. Probably more suited to the scholar, rather than a general audience. Many, many quotes first in the original French with translations in English slow the pace of the book.
Members of the committee praised the author's depth of analysis and impressive breadth of research They noted that the author's creative approach went beyond obvious and accepted interpretations of French nineteenth-century culture. Carol Rifelj, Middlebury College, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 39: 3 (Spring-Summer 2011) . Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Worn Through (September 2010)This book is a pleasure to read: extremely well-written, elegant, clear, fascinating, and witty. By reclaiming accessories from the margins of the realist novel, Hiner has written the most ingenious kind of fashion history, documenting not the whats, whos, and whens, but the elusive hows and whys. Victoria E. Costume Society of America, June 2011Persuasive and well written, Hiner's book shows that items we might tend to overlook have the capacity to illu
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. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.. 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. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals
Susan Hiner is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College.