Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women

Through the cross-analysis of images, interviews and garments, this volume charts the dawn of the French ready-made clothing industry between 1945 and 1968, linking it to national reconstruction and modernisation, gender identities and ideas of modernity.

A purposeful redress of French fashion history … bring[ing] to light the historical ‘conception of national and gender identities and modernity’ concerning ‘everyday day dress and women’s lives’ in post-war France.

Timely contribution to the field and [a] valuable addition to the complicated puzzle that is the deconstruction of European fashion history’s historiographical mythologies.

This carefully researched and illustrated book offers a vibrant cultural history of French ready-to-wear, and of the ways its organization, promotion and representation are intimately connected to conceptions of identity, femininity and modernity.

This important book responds with both clarity and finesse to a lack of in-depth studies of a key period in the history of fashion: the post-war era, when everything had to be reinvented; and during which the rise of Prêt à Porter and its creative proliferation in the 1960s mirrored the upheavals taking place within society.

Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women offers a compelling narrative of national reconstruction and gender identity in the ready-to-wear clothing industry of post-World War II France. Alexis Romano skillfully unpacks the relationship between fashion photography, women’s magazines and the city of Paris, and by interpreting fashion’s representations through the lens of political theory the author also makes an important contribution to methodology.

An important work that should be an essential point of reference for anyone who is interested in the relationship between haute couture and ready-to-wear, or in developments in fashion photography and promotion in the crucial period 1945–1968.

Alexis Romano is a scholar of dress, design history and visual culture. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and is co-founder of the Fashion Research Network. She holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and was the 2020-21 Curatorial Fellow at The Met’s Costume Institute.