The Women of Little Paris: Women's Fashion in Interwar Bucharest 1919-1939

Interwar Romania was a space of social-cultural contrasts which it wholeheartedly embraced. Bucharest, as the capital, was the perfect mirror of Romanian society, a liminal space, geographically and culturally. Women’s fashion and beauty in interwar middle-class Bucharest, offers a wide array of unexplored research questions which are addressed in the thesis. The timeframe begins with Greater Romania’s crystallization in 1919 and ends in 1939 with World War Two. The Introduction includes a general outline, aims, objectives and structure of the thesis. The Methodological Framework sets the study as an informed disciplinary discourse analysis, using fashion studies and cultural, urban, gender, media, literary, identity studies, and semiotics. The Literature Review outlines the context of the Romanian metropolitan and urban cultures within my thematic and theoretical framework. The following chapters comprise the analysis of the gathered primary material. The chapter Metropolitan and Urban Cultures: Bucharest offers a multidimensional portrait of Bucharest and its relationship with fashion. The chapter Gender, Body, Beauty summaries the theoretical aspects behind the interwar understanding of gender and beauty, the body, health, and the growing interest in social hygiene. The chapter Women’s Representation in Literature and Visual Arts is devoted to women’s textual and visual representations from personal and outer perspectives. The Conclusion synthesizes all these aspects within the larger scope of the phenomenon of Modernity. The thesis draws on the primary sources that have been absent or little used in the relevant research, thus making an outstanding contribution to the existing knowledge, and opening the path to interdisciplinary research on the subject. In this sense, the study transcends the specialized perspectives for a comprehensive image of interwar Romania seen through fashionable female Bucharesters.

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