Book Review: Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 by Alexis Romano (Bloomsbury 2022)

The often-intensive focus on Parisian haute couture and its roster of acclaimed designers has resulted in a certain level of neglect in the wider field of French fashion. Alexis Romano’s book Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945–68 (2022) provides a purposeful redress of French fashion history, examining the nation’s own idiosyncratic post-war readymade clothing industry (1945–68) whilst bringing to light a host of women that participated in this period of consumer culture, including jour-nalists, designers, magazine readers and wearers. Developed from Romano’s doctoral research, the book has been enriched with subsequent archival mate-rial discovered in prominent museum collections across the United States, London and France. The results can be discerned in the depth and detail of this exhaustive cultural history, evidenced in black-and-white illustrations which appear alongside distinctly evocative colour plates. Both framed and guided by contemporaneous French fashion media, predominantly found in the fashion magazine Elle (between 1945 and 1968), Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women, brings to light the historical ‘conception of national and gender identities and modernity’ concerning ‘everyday day dress and women’s lives’ in post-war France (3).

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Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women concludes with the infamous student revolts and political unrest of May 1968, often viewed ‘by historians as a moment of rupture, laying bare the tensions of the post-war period’ (174). However, as the author recognizes, history can never conclude, and there are many more ‘histories and voices that reflect the diversity of French fashion’ to be known (Romano 2024: 177). The very dissonances that Romano has noted through-out this study, I suggest, reveal and point to the profound beauty of history in its ability to be as much about the present as it is about the past it seeks to uncover, elucidate and share. For some readers, this history provocatively evokes a shared sense of disquiet at the familiarity of an omnipresent, some-times pernicious and historically persistent fragmentation of women’s lives, as exemplified and evident in the compulsive need to self-fashion in an ever-state of becoming (McDowell 2025). As Romano succinctly puts it, ‘clothing enveloped women who could not locate themselves in a fixed place and experienced a fragmented sense of self’ (167); upon reading this history of post-war French fashion, I am compelled to think about how it still does.

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