Caroline EVANS. “1900-1914. The Rationalisation of the Body”, Ch. 2, in The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900-1929. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 29-55.
For Problemata, the editorial team chose to publish Caroline Evans’ text into 4 parts, for which we propose specific subtitles.
See also:
Part 1. The birth of
the fashion business shows
from 31 January 2025: Part 3. Norms and standardisation: fashion show as parade
from 15 Febbruary 2025: Part 4. Last tango with fashion
Lucile in London
The most significant contributor to the early development of the fashion show was not, however, a Parisian dressmaker but a London one, Lady Duff Gordon, trading as Lucile.1 Around 1900 she staged her first London mannequin parades in her Hanover Square premises.2 In the 1910s she took her mannequins onto the international stage, using their cachet and glamour to establish herself overseas, and she went on to become the first international designer to have branches in four cities at once (London, New York, Paris, and Chicago).
Lucile did not invent the phenomenon of modelling, though nearly twenty years later she implied that she had.3 Rather, she created the fashion show, or ‘mannequin parade’, a cross between an elite party and a theatrical event held in her luxurious salon or, in the summer, its garden.4 Her second principal innovation was in the choice, styling and training of her mannequins. The first was a blonde girl in her early teens, Elsie Kings, who went to work for her in the late 1890s.5 Elsie, who like many girls of her age and class, had never worn a corset, recalled that she was fitted with a corset ‘cruelly lined with ribs of steel’ and was assured that, if she tightened the laces each day, “I would soon have less than my present enormous waistline of eighteen inches!”6 Over the following weeks, Lucile trained her in ‘charm of manner’ and deportment, including walking with heavy books balanced on her head:
daily I went through the gestures which would lead me to the proper manner of walking—quick, mincing, fashionable little steps or slow, languid, strolling ones… I soon learned the angle at which my hands appeared whitest, long and slender; at what degree my head best displayed my slender neck. Over and over it was impressed upon me that I had the gift of beauty, and never, never, must I do anything but enhance it! The superficiality of it all, the constant posing and striving for effect, as compared to the naturalness of the present day life and model [in 1927] is almost unbelievable.7
Lucile trained all her mannequins in deportment, carriage and gesture, even going so far as to rename them with exotic stage names such as Corisande, Gamela and Hebe.8 She also claimed that she was the first to take them out of the ugly black fourreau, although she did not acknowledge that other Paris and London dressmakers had used flesh-colored fourreaux as early as 1897 and many were abandoning it altogether by 1907.9
Her mannequins were widely admired by the English press which used them to proclaim a new kind of modern glamour. Trained to strike dramatic poses, during the parades they barely smiled and never spoke, their working-class origins as ambiguously veiled as the beautiful bodies they paraded to an audience of middle- and upper-class men and women, the men, Kaplan and Stowell argue, “lured by the prospect of inspecting flesh as well as fabric.”10
Elsie put it more decorously: “romance came very often to our house. The beautiful girls attracted our customers’ male friends, and down they would settle to the more secure if less exciting existence of marriage.”11 The theme of working-class mannequins marrying rich or titled men later provided the plot for many fiction films such as Howard Hawkes’s Fig Leaves of 1926.
In her autobiography of 1932, Discretions and Indiscretions, Lucile wrote:
The evolution of the mannequin was brought about in my grey salons in Hanover Square… Slowly the idea of a mannequin parade, which would be as entertaining to watch as a play, took shape in my mind. I would have glorious, Goddess-like girls, who would walk to and fro dressed in my models, displaying them to the best advantage to an audience of admiring women.12
Lucile had designed the stage costumes for the London production of The Liars in 1897 and understood how the couture house could function like a theatre in which women of all classes could see the latest styles being worn.13 She was probably the first to build a modelling stage in her salon (Beer’s Paris stage was first recorded in 1903), wiring it for footlights in front and draping it in olive chiffon.14 Fig. 1 In 1904 it was described as
a draped stage in soft French grey-green, on to which floated tall slender women with that sinuous walk which never fails to make its appeal to the warmer side of social life. They were dressed in elusive pale symbolic gowns, parables of beauty… the girl… walked towards me and away with that wonderful swaying step that Lucile teaches all her models.15
Randy Bigham writes that it took Lucile a few years to bring together all the elements of the fashion show.16 They coalesced in her spring 1904 show at 23 Hanover Square: the stage, an orchestra, lights, tea, show invitations and show programmes, with a glittering mixture of guests from society and stage and even journalists to ensure the event was written up.17 As each mannequin made her entrance, wearing a cloth band on her arm bearing the number of the dress, Lucile called out the name of the dress. Over the decade, she gave her gowns names with overtly sexual connotations, such as Come to Me, The Captain with the Whiskers, The Sighing Sound of Lips Unsatisfied and When Passion’s Thrall is O’er. In 1905 she staged a “Symposium of Dress”18 and, in 1909, the “Seven Ages of Woman”, written by her sister the popular novelist Elinor Glyn. It included tableaux intended to appeal to “the married woman who entertained, was entertained, and who could indulge in the luxury of a lover”.19 The names and order of the gowns constituted a clear subtext of sexual pleasure and fulfilment: The Desire of the Eyes, Persuasive Delight, Visible Harmony, A Frenzied Hour, Salut d’Amour, Afterwards and Contentment.
The pace of early fashion shows was slow and the modern practice of ceaseless backstage quick-changes was anathema.20 Shows often lasted an hour and a half or more and clients would wait while the mannequins’ hair was rearranged to fit the style of each dress, with slippers and stockings changed to accessorize it correctly. Lucile was an innovator in coordinating and accessorizing her mannequins, so a dress was always shown with matching boots, stockings, hat, gloves, handkerchief, veil, and jewelry.21 The garden shows even stretched to pedigree dogs with jeweled leashes coordinated to the mannequins’ gowns.22
Lucile, like the French couturiers, publicized her fashion shows as elite, luxury spectacles for individual clients but she was also influential within the trade. Not long after her first shows, London department stores began to stage fashion shows, albeit less exclusive ones.23 In 1908 Femina magazine in France illustrated her London stage (see Fig. 1), and described the growing tendency to install modelling stages in Paris as an innovation from London.24 She visited America in 190725 and in both 1907 and 1908 she was included in fashion shows of French couturiers at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, which suggests that she must have had some contact with department-store buyers. Although no details are known about Lucile’s relations with French couture houses from the late 1890s to the 1900s, as a London dressmaker she would have been aware of the trade links between both cities.26
Poiret In Paris
While Lucile was developing her fashion shows in London, Paul Poiret opened his first maison de couture in Paris in 1903 at 5 rue Auber. In 1906 he moved to 37 rue Pasquier and in 1909 to a building at 9 avenue d’Antin which abutted 107 faubourg Saint-Honoré, where he remained until 1924 when he moved to the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées.27 From these premises Poiret made his own, considerable, contribution to the history of fashion shows as a form of modern marketing and promotion. Like Lucile, Poiret was known for his seductive presentation and the way he carefully accessorized his mannequins: they too were considered singularly modern and intriguing.28 Fig. 2
In 1910 a journalist marveled at the colors he put the mannequins in: Titian-haired, with pink and white skin, a mannequin dressed entirely in vibrant green was deemed “extremely original”.29 Also like Lucile, Poiret used his garden for fashion shows which were reported as far afield as New York and Chicago.30 Unlike Lucile and Beer, however, Poiret did not build a stage for his mannequins until 1909 when he moved to an eighteenth-century hôtel in avenue d’Antin which he commissioned Louis Süe to renovate. Fig. 3 There he installed a small proscenium stage, perhaps inspired by the Femina illustration of Lucile’s stage the previous year (see Fig. 1). Before as many as eighty women a day, from five to seven every afternoon (de cinq à sept), his mannequins, “lissom as nymphs, file past in this living, colourful but wholly unpretentious scene”, as he wrote in his memoirs.31
Poiret sold models to American buyers from the start but, like Lucile, did not publicize this fact, choosing instead to present himself as a couturier de luxe.32 It was not until 1914 that he even referred to foreign buyers.33 His extravagance was prodigious, often wasteful. Yet he clearly had a sense of the requirements of international trade and maintained strong links with European and American department stores, travelling to Berlin in 1910, touring Europe in 1911, America in 1913 and both continents in the 1920s. He took pains to exclude unauthorized copyists from his shows and dealt with piracy by following a system “which, so everyone assured him, would ruin him. Visitors to his establishment are asked to inscribe their names in a big book, also information as to who they are and where they come from. At the top of the page is a courteous announcement that a visitor is expected to buy at least one frock”.34
The mannequin parade was only one of the devices Poiret pioneered to promote his business as a form of what today is called ‘lifestyle marketing’. In the years leading up to the First World War, besides running his couture house and staging fashion shows, he produced a perfume, he designed for the stage, he opened an interior design studio and school, he cultivated the press and he threw spectacular themed parties.35 He went on overseas mannequin tours and commissioned illustrators to make luxury albums of his fashion designs. In 1911 he was the first to use both photography and film to promote his collections, modelled by his house mannequins.36
The fashion press of both America and France nearly always presented a benign, even adulatory, image of the fashion shows of Poiret and Lucile. Only the left-wing press criticized couture employment practices.37 In 1914, however, the caricaturist Sem (Georges Goursat) produced an illustrated album which viciously lampooned the new breed of modern couturiers. Le vrai et le faux chic lambasts the excesses of modern fashion, reserving its most excoriating criticism for the new kind of fashion show which Sem called “scenes of modern hysteria”.38 Fig. 4
He describes a vibrant atmosphere, over-saturated with exquisite perfumes and charged with waves of nervous feeling in an audience of deluded society women, actresses and courtesans who are all swept up in the ‘delirium of dressing’ by the mannequin parade: “Around them, the mute mannequins with waxen smiles come, go and come again, brushing past them, enveloping them with the caress of their trailing garments, tirelessly repeated, intoxicating their imaginations with rhythmic and undulating movements, with seductive poses, with discreet and knowing contortions.”39
Sem attacks the new second-rate fashion houses that have spilled out from the rue de la Paix and were then opening all over Paris.40 He does not name the designers he attacks and it is possible that the show illustrated here is a hybrid of Poiret and Lucile’s shows, although the lampshade skirt suggests Poiret. Much of the rest of the album, particularly the section called ‘Museum of Errors’, is clearly an attack on Poiret, who responded vociferously in the press, threatening to retaliate with a book called The True and False Talent.41 Another caricature of a fashion show depicts a room like Lucile’s Paris salon, however, and Sem’s textual references to tea, music and tangoing mannequins may also be a swipe at Lucile.42 In the new houses, writes Sem,
There, there is no holding back. These shameless manufacturers have become veritable impresarios, staging a kind of gala each season and, under the pretext of launching the new fashions, organising the presentation of their new models like a music hall extravaganza. Between a tango by Mistinguett and a song by Fursy, on a stage garlanded by paper flowers and Chinese lanterns in the midst of the audience, they parade à la “Sumurun”43 to music, a strange corps de ballet which is more or less Russian, Persian or Romany, an entire procession of disjointed mannequins, of snake-women sheathed in venomous outfits who undulate, slowly convulse, stomachs forward like an offering, a foot trailing, miming a kind of purposeless tango before the eyes of the female audience - unhappy little snobs that these unprincipled managers over-excite with adulterated tea and mild drugs, while awaiting the next day when they will extend their cynicism so far as to drug them on cocaine and ether, the better to prepare them, to reduce them to a state of poor unconscious women, ready to submit to the most extravagant exploitation.44
Here, besides accusing the new wave of parvenu haute couturiers of drug-pushing, Sem was criticizing them for vulgarizing taste and reducing fashion to music hall. He was, as Nancy Troy has shown, virulently anti-Semitic and racist, even by the standards of his day.45 Certainly, he attacked Poiret’s orientalism in the pages that follow and added his own brand of primitivism in his description of the reptilian mannequins in the fashion show, while decrying the “moral and material perversion in these scandalous exhibitions of a selection of mannequins from which only the negress is missing”.46 Fig. 5 This illustration of a black mannequin is perhaps an imagined one rather than a true depiction, since the first report of a black mannequin in Paris comes from 1928, but Sem’s illustration is an oddity, not least because it is far different from his virulently racist illustrations of African women in tribal dress in the pages that follow.47 Although the tangoing mannequins of the fashion show, whom Sem excoriated, were always white, the dance itself was, as Alessandra Vaccari argues, a route whereby black culture came to Europe, creating an interface for cultural miscegenation.48
Poiret himself promoted both his orientalist fashions and a vision of himself as a pasha or head of a harem. From 1909 until 1924 when new backers took control of his company and put a brake on events, he staged a series of fashion shows, parties and fêtes in which his mannequins featured prominently. He also took them out and about with him in Paris, thus ensuring that they were publicized as his ‘court’, associated with his orientalism and, in particular, his representation of himself as a sultan at his famous Thousand and Second Night party on 24 June 1911.49 Poiret’s orientalism fascinated American journalists; one wrote that only a person “who has eaten hashish, smoked opium, chewed the betel nut, or tasted the lotus leaf can imagine what they [his designs] are like”.50 In this article, however, orientalism is conflated with masculinity: the writer describes a unisex couple at Poiret, where
the man manikin accompanies the girl manikin in clothes which are likewise. Or approximately likewise. He wears trousers; so does she. He wears a prince Albert; so does she. He wears a top hat; she does the same. A cutaway; she beats him to it. He weareth hith thuthpenderth; she wears ’em also, or, rather, a pair of her own. Spats; she too.
In this way, Poiret’s orientalism became conflated with a modern and transgressive gender masquerade; Fig. 6 for, as Kenneth Silver argued, contemporary attacks on Poiret’s orientalism were really attacks on his avant-gardism, in which his orientalism was conflated with a range of cultural “others”.51
Lucile et Cie, Paris
In 1910 Lucile opened the first of her international branches, in New York (see Chapter 4). The following year she did something considerably more audacious for an English dressmaker, establishing a branch in Paris, the cultural and economic capital of haute couture.52 On 4 April 1911, at 11 rue de Penthièvre, Lucile et Cie opened to the public with an ‘English tea’ and a fashion show of two hundred models displayed by four London mannequins on a specially constructed modelling stage.53 The Dry Goods Economist described how the strong overhead lighting above the somber tones of the dark grey velvet drapery set off the model dresses to great advantage: “This miniature theatre has created quite a sensation in Paris.”54 Lucile’s show drew so many visitors that it was repeated over five days.55 For her second season, in August 2011, Lucile again held an afternoon tea with music and a guided tour round the new premises furnished and decorated by Liberty of London.56 This became the pattern for Lucile’s Paris shows, which might run over several days and feature “music, tea and all the trimmings of a fashionable reception”.57
The distinctive style of her English mannequins was noted and Elsie Kings recalled “the contrast between the sharp, almost staccato type of French girl who exhibited clothes, and our sinuous, dreamy, velvet-eyed models”.58 Surviving newsreel footage from 1914 confirms how different Lucile’s mannequins were from Paris mannequins, both in their longer, more slender physiques and in their languorously elegant modelling styles. Fig. 7 French press responses to Lucile’s opening show were mixed. While Excelsior reviewed it in fulsome terms, Fantasio sneered at her ‘gowns of emotion’ and implied that she was both pretentious and vulgarly commercial. As for the sobbing violins accompanying the presentation, they were ‘miaow-sic’: caterwauling.59 Femina, on the other hand, illustrated a Lucile fashion show in wholly flattering terms.60 Fig. 8 It even went so far as to suggest, unlike other French journalists who implied that the mannequin parade was quintessentially French, that the French were following an American precedent in fitting a modelling stage. Lucile had opened her New York house the previous year and, although she is not named in this article, it seems clear that the reference to American houses is to her. Two months after her first Paris opening, the Paris dressmaker Chary staged a fashion show in a rented theatre as a one-act playlet showing a day in the life of the mannequins, followed by music, tea and refreshments.61 On the whole, however, while Lucile’s contribution to fashion marketing and promotion is undeniable, it was far greater in America, where she was widely written about, than in France where she received considerably less press.62
Both Lucile and Poiret were satirized in a popular stage play, Rue de la Paix by Abel Hermant and Marc de Toledo, which opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris in January 1912. The play was a glorified fashion show masquerading as a melodrama, with costumes designed by the fashion illustrator Paul Iribe and executed by Paquin. Fig. 9 It concerned the rivalry between two couture houses whose directors, M. Baudry and Lady de Leeds, were thinly veiled portraits of Poiret and Lucile.63 The Boston Daily Globe wrote that
anyone familiar with the ways of the mannequins of the Rue de la Paix could not fail to recognise the faithful character studies. The Parisiennes, who are nothing if not a little malicious, are laughing in their sleeves at the veiled skit, in the last act, on the much advertised opening of a dressmaking atelier by a well-known society woman. It is not so very many months since we had, here in Paris, just such an opening day, and the skit at the Vaudeville is so lifelike that it might almost be said to be a little ill-natured.64
The play, which showcased Paquin’s gowns for Iribe, opened just as the international buyers were arriving in Paris for the February 1912 openings. It was therefore avidly attended by Paquin’s rival dressmakers, as well as by the buyers.65 Rue de la Paix gives an insight into the commercial practices of elite fashion, opening with a scene of mannequins modelling not to luxury clients but to a woman buyer who is seated next to her commissionnaire, an important type of Parisian agent responsible for shepherding overseas buyers around the shows and organizing their purchases and shipping for them. In the play the commissionnaire, with notebook in hand, writes down the names and prices of the dresses the American buyer selects.66 The mannequins gossip backstage about the amorous intrigues of their clients and employers and the play paints a seamy picture of sexual laxity, commercial skullduggery and workplace exploitation at odds with the couturiers’ own self-promotion.67 Its tenor suggests, like Sem’s caricatures, that fashion shows were a source of lively entertainment in the period.68 Their satires reveal scenes of sexual and commercial lubricity absent from fashion journalism, which tended to endorse the system of which it was a part in flowery and hyperbolic language.
Bibliography
Articles or Chapters
BABIN, Gustave. Une leçon d’élégance dans un parc, L’Illustration, 9 July 1910.
BARBERA, Anne. Des journaux et des modes, in Femmes fin de siècle, 1885-1895. Paris: Musée de la Mode et du Costume, Palais Galliera, 1990, p. 103-117.
BARCLAY, George. Journey with Mere Man, Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 September 1910.
BOWLT, John E. Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova and Pablo Picasso, in PRITCHARD, Jane (ed.). Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes. London: V&A Publications, 2010, p. 104-105.
BRACHET CHAMPSAUR, Florence. Madeleine Vionnet and Galeries Lafayette: The Unlikely Marriage of a Parisian Couture House and a French Department Store, 1922-40, Business History, Vol. LIV, no. I, 2012, p. 48-56.
BRANDSTETTER, Gabriele. Pose-Posa-Posing: Between Image and Movement, in BIPPUS Elke and Dorothea MINK (eds.). Fashion Body Cult. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2007.
BRISSAUD, Pierre. Le théâtre du grand couturier, Femina, 15 December 1911.
BUEL, Mary. Radical Changes in Paris Fashion, Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 August 1913.
CORELLI, Marie. Marie Corelli, Novelist, on the Madness of Clothes, Washington Post, 30 July 1905.
CORNU, Paul. The Art of the Dress, Art et décoration, April 1911. DAVIS, Mary E. Modernity à la mode: Popular Culture and Avant-Gardism in Erik Satie’s ‘Sports et Divertissements’, Musical Quarterly, LXXXIII, 3, Autumn 1999, p. 430-473. GHENYA. La journée d’un mannequin, Le Figaro-Modes, February 1904, p. 14-19. —. Very Pretty Work: Women Now Receive Compensation Simply Wearing the Costliest and Most Exquisite of Dresses, Boston Daily Globe, 29 September 1907.
GIAFAR. Petits contes du Calife sur les harems de la couture, Fantasio, 15 August 1913, p. 56-57.
GRONBERG, Tag. Deco Venus, in ARSCOTT, Carolin and Katie SCOTT (eds.). Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 142-155.
HENRIOT, Émile. Figures parisiennes : le mannequin, L’Illustration, 27 December 1913.
LANG, Evelyn M. Great Parisian Dressmakers: Paquin and Laferrière, The Lady’s Realm, February 1902, p. 620-625. —. ‘Launchers of Fashion’: How Paris Modes Are Started on their Victorious Careers, The Tatler, 31 January 1906, p. 172. —. Chez un grand couturier parisien — les mannequins, Femina, 15 November 1903, p. 735.
Le Mannequin d’Hozier. Modanités, Fantasio, 15 February 1910, p. 502. –. Modanités, Fantasio, 15 March 1911, p. 574.
LYND, Robert. Thoughts at a Tango Tea, The Book of This and That, 1915, p. 24-26.
MONTOISON. La fête chez Paul, Fantasio, 15 July 1911.
NEWMAN, E. M. Nothing to Do but Wear Fine Clothes!, Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 November 1913.
OWENS, Craig. Posieren, in WOLF, Herta (ed. in collaboration with Susanne HOLSCHBACH et al.). Diskurse der Fotografie: Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003, vol. II, esp. 107ff.
POUILLARD, Véronique. Design Piracy in the Fashion Industries of Paris and New York in the Interwar Years, Business History Review, LXXXV, 2, Summer 2011, p. 319-344.
RITTENHOUSE, Anne. What the Well-Dressed Woman Is Wearing, New York Times, 29 September 1912. –. Clothes Worn at the French Races Again Eccentric – New Turban the Highest Hat in Decades, New York Times, 7 August 1910.
SCHLESINGER, Kathleen. The Growth of a Paris Costume, The Lady’s Realm, June 1900, p. 210-216. —. Intime, A Parisian Prince of Dress, The Lady’s Realm, November 1900, p. 21-26. —. Une journée chez un grand couturier (Redfern), Femina, 13 April 1901, p. 125-128. —. Paris Couturiers, Los Angeles Times, 6 January 1901.
SCHWARTZ, Hillel. Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century, in CRARY, Jonathan and Sanford KWINTER (eds.). Incorporations. New York: Zone Books, 1992, p. 88-89.
SEANTIER, Lisa. Les Archives sonores du défilé, in Musée Galliera. Showtime: le défilé de mode. Paris: Éditions Paris-Musées, 2006
STRAKOSCH, Avery. Fashions for the Famous: Dressmaking Days with Lady Duff-Gordon, as Told by Her First Model, Miss Elsie, Saturday Evening Post, 29 January 1927.
TAYLOR, Lou. Marguerite Shoobert, London Fashion Model 1906-1917, Costume (U.K.), XVII, 1983, p. 105-110.
TÉTART-VITTU, Françoise. Couture et nouveautés confectionnées, in Au paradis des dames : nouveautés, modes et confections, 1810-1870. Paris: Éditions Paris-Musées, Musée de la Mode et du Costume, 1992. —. Le chic parisien : images et modèles dans la presse illustrée, in Femmes fin de siècle, 1885-1895. Paris: Musée de la Mode et du Costume, Palais Galliera, 1990, p. 93-102.
UHLIROVA, Marketa. Scandal, Satire and Vampirism: The Kidnapping of Fux Banker, in Marketa UHLIROVA (ed.). If Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s Image of Fashion, Crime and Violence. London: Koenig Books, 2008, p. 107-117.
WILSON, Carolyn. M. Poiret Versus M. Sem, Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 July 1914.
WOODCOCK, Sarah. Wardrobe, in PRITCHARD, Jane (ed.). Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes. London: V&A Publications, 2010.
Books
ALEXANDRE, Arsène. Les Reines de l’aiguille : modistes et couturières (Étude parisienne). Paris: Théophile Belin, 1902.
ANGÉ, Louis. Traité pratique de publicité commerciale et industrielle. 2 vols, Éditions Pratique de Publicité Commerciale et Industrielle, 1922.
AVENEL (d’) Le Vicomte Georges. Le Mécanisme de la vie moderne. Part 4. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1902.
BAUDOT, François. Poiret. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
BIGHAM, Randy Bryan. Lucile–Her Life by Design: Sex, Style, and the Fusion of Theater and Couture. Raleigh, N.C.: Lulu Press Inc., 2012.
BRAND, Jan and José TEUNISSEN (eds.). The Power of Fashion: About Design and Meaning. Arnhem: Uitgeverij Terra Lannoo BV and ArtEZPress, 2006.
BRAUN, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
BUCKLE, Richard. Nijinsky [1971]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
CHADWICK, Whitney and Tirza True LATIMER (eds.). The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
COCTEAU, Jean. Paris Album 1900-1914 [first published in Le Figaro, then as Portraits-Souvenir, Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1956]. Trans. Margaret Crosland. London: Comet/W.H. Allen, 1987.
DAVIS, Mary E. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006. —. Ballets Russes Style: Diaghilev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion. London: Reaktion, 2010.
DESLANDRES, Yvonne. Poiret: Paul Poiret 1879–1944. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.
DUFF GORDON, Lady (Lucile). Discretions and Indiscretions. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1932.
ETHERINGTON-SMITH, Meredith. Patou. London: Hutchinson, 1983. — and Jeremy PILCHER. The ‘It’ Girls: Lady Duff Gordon, the Couturiere ‘Lucile’ and Elinor Glyn, Romantic Novelist. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986.
GARAFOLA, Lynn. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.
GARLAND, Madge. The Changing Form of Fashion. New York: Praeger, 1970. GIEDION, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command [1948]. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969. GREER, Howard. Designing Male. London: Robert Hale, 1952.
GRONBERG, Tag. Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
GRUMBACH, Didier. Histoires de la mode. Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2008.
HOLSCHBACH, Susanne. Vom Ausdruck zur Pose: Theatralität und Weiblichkeit in der Fotografie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Reimer, 2006. HOPKINS, Albert A. Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Tricks Photography (first published as Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography, 1898). New York: Dover Publications, 1976. KAPLAN, Joel and Sheila STOWELL. Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Le Petit Homme Rouge [Ernest A. Vizetelly]. The Court of the Tuileries 1852-1870: Its Organization, Chief Personages, Splendour, Frivolity, and Downfall. London: Chatto & Windus, 1907.
LEEUW-DE MONTI, Matteo and Petra TIMMER. Colour Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay. Ed. Matilda McQuaid and Susan Brown. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011.
LISTA, Giovanni. Futurism and Photography. London: Merrell with the Estorick Collection, 2001.
MACKRELL, Alice. Paul Poiret. London: Batsford, 1990.
MATHESON, Rebecca Jumper and Molly Frances SORKIN. Designing the It Girl: Lucile and Her Style. New York: Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology, 2005.
MENDES, Valerie D. and Amy de la HAYE. Lucile Ltd: London, Paris, New York and Chicago, 1890s-1930s. London: V&A Publishing, 2009.
O’NEILL, Alistair. London – After a Fashion. London: Reaktion, 2007.
POIRET, Paul. My First Fifty Years (En habillant l’époque). Trans. Stephen Haden Guest. London: Victor Gollancz, 1931.
OTTINGER, Didier (ed.). Futurism. Paris: 5 Continents Éditions/Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009.
ROGER-MILÈS, Léon. Les Créateurs de la mode. Paris: Éditions du Figaro, 1910. S.a. Histoire de l’industrie et du commerce en France : l’effort économique français contemporain. 4 vols. Paris: Éditions d’Art et d’Histoire, 1926. —. Glossy. Marseille: Musée de la mode de Marseille, Images et Manœuvres Édition, 2004. SAUNDERS, Edith. The Age of Worth: Couturier to the Empress Eugénie. London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co, 1954.
Gino SEVERINI. The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini. Trans. Jennifer Franchina. Princeton University Press, 1995.
SCHWEITZER, Marlis. When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
SEEBOHM, Caroline. The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
SEM. Le vrai et le faux chic. Paris: Succès, 1914, n.p.
SILVER, Kenneth E. Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925. Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 174-181.
TOLINI-FINAMORE, Michelle. Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
TROY, Nancy. Couture Culture: A Study in Art and Fashion. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2003.
UHLIROVA, Marketa (ed.). If Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s Image of Fashion, Crime and Violence. London: Koenig Books, 2008.
VIGARELLO, Georges. Le Corps redressé : histoire d’un pouvoir pédagogique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978, p. 10.
WANAMAKER, John. Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, Jubilee Year, 1861-1911. Philadelphia, Penn.: Wanamaker, 1911.
WHITE, Palmer. Poiret. London: studio Vista, 1973.
WORTH, Jean-Philippe. A Century of Fashion. Trans. Ruth Scott Miller. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1928.
ZAZZO, Anne (ed.). Showtime : le défilé de mode. Paris: Éditions Paris-Musées, Musée Galliera, 2006.
Theses
SAFER, Samantha Erin. Promotion Queen: Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon. MA diss., Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Arts, 2007.
STEELE, Victoria. The Fashion Stages of Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon. PhD Diss., University of Southern California, 2000.
REEDER, Jan Glier. The Touch of Paquin 1891-1920. MA Diss., State University of New York, Fashion Institute of Technology, 1990.