Women's subjectivity and Fashion prints
The female form featured in fashion plates became ubiquitous models of the real subject, Fashion, not long after their real-life counterparts had fought and lost in their assertion for the rights of women in the public sphere following the French Revolution. While the simpler, more comfortable Neoclassical style freed women from their multilayered, corseted ensembles, the freedom they unleashed was soon co-opted by the empire of fashion in alliance with new societal norms confining women to domestic concerns. Women’s journals were mostly contributed to and published by male writers and artists; their works fostered the new normal by returning women to the kingdom of romantic courtships and the realm of the private sphere, yet at the same time the depictions of flirtatious or sexualy charged public behaviors pushed the envelope of acceptable conduct, as evident in the fashion plates. While they serve to market the clothing and accessories by attracting the reader’s attention, they also sent mixed messages regarding social behaviors and set beauty standards. Under these circumstances, middle-class women asserted themselves economically as avid consumers of trendy apparel, domestic goods and printed materials but at the same time appeared to be largely dispossessed of their subjectivity in print media by the purview of men; instead, the discourse of Fashion, including the fashion prints aimed at the female audience, became women’s surrogate in the public arena. The mid 20th century reproduction of such fashion prints from the late 18th century, could be regarded as a further artistic sublimation of the genre. Published a time when post-war France was witnessing a cultural collision between haute-couture and the sexual and feminist revolutions, these illustrations once again stood poised in the same intersection as they did at their conception.