Queens of the catwalk: fashion models in the modernist period

Regal, imperious, unsmiling: such were the first fashion models. Yet, for all their queenly bearing, they were much put-upon. Figures of a particularly modern glamour, they were nevertheless the victims of long hours, social inequality, and low pay. The fashion house was described as a hive by journalists such Arsène Alexandre in 1902, but the queen bee was the couturier not the model. She, by contrast, was one of the most prestigious workers. This paper looks at the ambiguities and contradictions that surrounded the first fashion models in French couture houses from approximately 1900-1930.‘No other female profession,’ wrote Colette in 1925, ‘contains such powerful elements of moral disaggregation as hers, which imposes the exterior signs of richness on a poor and beautiful girl.’ The paper focuses on the class dynamic and masquerade of fashion modelling in the modernist period, and relates it to the wider context of the rationalization of the body in the fields of work, leisure and art.

The purpose of this symposium is to discuss fashion as a socio-political arena where notions of gender, class and power are being negotiated. Aiming at an exploration of fashion’s hybrid nature between mediality and materiality, we have invited some of the leading theorists and practitioners in the field of fashion and fashion studies to take part.