Foujita, Fashion, and the Aesthetic Codification of the Male Modern Artist

It is well established that the Japanese painter Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886, Tokyo–1968, Zurich), known as Foujita, used style-fashion-dress as an important strategy in his quest to become one of the most well-known and successful artists working in Paris in the interwar era. After his move to Paris in 1913, Foujita found relatively quick success among modernist artists, art critics and in the art market, while becoming famous for his flamboyant dress style, his signature bangs, round eyeglasses, moustache, and hoop earrings. He took pleasure in dressing up, made his own clothes, and became so well known that a mannequin of his likeness was created for a Parisian department store. Rather than focus on the photographic evidence of his sartorial choices in everyday life, my research looks at the artist’s self-fashioning in his painted and drawn self-portraits and proposes that both do not seamlessly align. In his artworks, Foujita appears to offer a subtle counter-narrative to that constructed through his style and clothing choices in staged photographs and snapshots– one that reveals a critical awareness of the temporal operations of fashion and functions simultaneously as enactment of and intervention in the gendered and racialised ideologies and structures of the Western art world in which he operated.