Fashioning the City

Paris, Fashion and the Media

The fashion media have been central to the consecration of the city of Paris on the fashion map, as well as its celebration in the collective imagination. Indeed, with its conjunction of images and words, the fashion press constitutes a rich platform for an interrogation of how Paris has come to be constituted as a leading fashion city. Yet while much attention has been paid to the making of Paris in the work of various writers and artists, little is known about the city as defined and created by the fashion media. Based on an original analysis of fashion writing and images in contemporary French fashion magazines and newspapers, this illuminating book focuses on the discourse of the contemporary French fashion press on Paris, and so attends to this gap in studies of the French capital. Agnès Rocamora explores, for example, the figures of la Parisienne and la passante (the female passer-by), and the presence of the Eiffel Tower in fashion visuals. She gives attention to the continuum between the French journalistic discourse and that of cultural forms such as films, paintings and literature, thus revealing the persistence across texts and time of visions of Paris and shedding light on the production and reproduction of the Paris myth.