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Glorified as one of today's foremost fashion capitals, Paris of the late nineteenth century offered an abundance of spaces where one could marvel at fashionable attire donned by ladies and dandies alike. Fashioning Spaces (University of Toronto Press, 2015) examines what author Heidi Brevik-Zender refers to as the "spatial turn" (5) in representations of Paris during the Third Republic. More precisely, the book addresses the depiction of spaces related to fashion in literary works between roughly 1870 and 1900. Brevik-Zender focuses on what she terms "dislocations," which are "[…] spaces of disruption in which challenges to traditional relationships of power--primarily those of class and gender--provocatively occur" (7). Fashionable locations abound in literature written about nineteenth-century Paris, from Haussmannian boulevards to department stores and public parks. However critics have privileged these more evident sartorial locales, neglecting the three dislocations foregrounded in Fashioning Spaces: the staircase, the antechamber, and the fashion atelier. With this impressive monograph, Brevik-Zender convincingly demonstrates the great extent to which writers used fashion's dislocations--spaces in which clothing was displayed, worn, tried on, or fabricated--to negotiate the social climate of their era.
Fashioning Spaces contains three parts, each of which includes two chapters treating one of the three featured dislocations. The author examines both widely read and lesser-known texts, with evident choices like Zola's Au Bonheur des dames and La Curée treated alongside works by Rachilde and Feydeau. The book's diverse corpus includes novels, plays, and short stories and is supplemented by abundant examples from visual and material culture – including paintings by Caillebotte and Degas, ornate details from Third Republic dress, caricatures by Vernier and Grévin, and even performance techniques made famous by modern dancer Loie Fuller. Deftly covering a vast range of cultural material, Brevik-Zender exposes the permeability of the literary, artistic, and social worlds in late-nineteenth-century Paris.
The book opens...