3 - Educating the Female Consumer: Early Fashion Journals

Summary

THIS CHAPTER looks at the two most influential and long-lasting early fashion journals in France: Le Cabinet des modes (1785–93) and Le Journal des dames et des modes (1797–1839). These journals are particularly relevant to this study in that, between them, they cover a 54-year period that witnessed numerous regime changes, including, most importantly, the advent of the French Revolution. What is striking for today's reader is these journals’ remarkable ability to avoid explicit discussion of the political events unfolding around them while simultaneously acknowledging their impact via a range of journalistic discourses and debates. As this chapter demonstrates, part of this (adapt)ability originates in the more heterogeneous contemporary understanding of the term mode and in fashion journals’ consequent coverage of a much broader range of topics than today's ‘glossies’. These journals’ resolute focus on educating the female reader on what and how to consume – whether plays, books, clothes, morals or instruction – simultaneously provides her with numerous ‘interstitial’ indices of the constituents of more politicised figurations of French womanhood. This chapter argues that, among the plural and often contradictory discourses articulated in these journals, the insightful contemporary reader would – or at the very least could – have found the intellectual sustenance and supportive sense of sorority to aid her in her journey towards self-realisation. While fashion takes on more definitively gendered associations as the nineteenth century gets underway, in the journals examined here it is firmly associated with le monde, with a broadening of epistemological and cultural horizons. The publication of Le Cabinet des modes and Le Journal des dames et des modes coincided with the growing public debate on French women's right to a compulsory and improved education, and, as the final section of this chapter makes clear, these journals engage in that debate, both tangentially in their role as cultural and sartorial educator and directly in their discussions of the ideal components of a new female-focused pedagogy in France.

The period covered by these two journals bears witness to a drive for greater democratisation of the public realm, including the democratisation of fashion, in which fashion is no longer the unique preserve of the Cour. The dilution of a more rigidly stratified and codified society post-Revolution brings with it the imperative to educate and inform the reading public as to the significance and signification of a plethora of changing new fashions, customs and concepts.