“Without Rival”

Abstract

During the belle époque, a vision of Parisian garment workers as guardians of a French cultural monopoly on luxury taste was deployed by trade industrialists, labor inspectors, philanthropists, and government officials assessing the state of the garment industry. In examining exhibition reports, ministerial inquiries, and labor reform commissions, it becomes evident that assertions of French fashion genius were threaded throughout debates about industrial trade and regulation for audiences both abroad and at home. This reveals a peculiarly French investment in fashion and tastefulness. Furthermore, national taste supremacy combined with fears about the vulnerability of the couture industry to stymie attempts at regulating workplace and environmental hazards in this period. This chapter begins by exploring rhetoric about the Parisian garment worker around the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908, when French and British commentators alike praised French luxury garment products, and evoked Paris as the site of garment trade art and Parisian workingwomen as the preternaturally tasteful if antediluvian instruments of that art. It then interrogates how such encomia to garment worker taste and vulnerability operated in two debates about workplace reform during the belle époque: efforts to eliminate night garment work and those to regulate toxic substances in artificial flowermaking.