Marketing Fabrics and Femininity in Interwar France

Abstract

This article examines discourse about the gender of garments and dress fabrics in the French fashion media, using Roland Barthes's 'informal semiotics' of modern consumption, and particularly his notion of the fashion magazine as a 'machine' articulating the meaning of fashion, including the gender implications of fashion and fabrics. The article also tracks the response of French couturiers and textile manufacturers to anxieties about gender ambiguities in ladieswear between the two world wars. The first part analyzes coverage of chemise dresses and ladies' suits in 13 illustrated magazines: four fashion magazines, three fashion supplements, three trade magazines and three society magazines. The second part of the article explores the attitudes of textile manufacturers' associations, of prominent woollen and silk producers, and of their marketing campaigns, to more androgynous styles using the same sources, professional bulletins, and the minutes of the Silk Manufacturers Syndicate (Chambre Syndicale des Fabricants de Soieries).