La Femme des Foules: La Passante, la Mode et la Ville

Images of women walking in city streets constitute a significant mode of representation of fashionable female city-dwellers, with the street a stage for the display of fashionable styles, for looking and being looked at. However, while much attention has been paid in academia to the subject of the gaze in this game of fashion the flâneur, its object, la passante, has been ignored. In this paper, I compare the concepts of the flâneur with that of the passante. I look at the appropriation of the figure of la passante in the French fashion media, discussing its relevance to fashion discourse and the representation of fashion and the metropolis.

A short version of the paper was presented in English at the ‘Dressing Rooms’ conference (Oslo, May 2007) upon which I was invited to publish a developed version, to be translated in Russian, in Russian Fashion Theory, for a special issue on the Flâneur (2007).