Fashion’s Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century France: Introduction

Fashion and power have been inextricably linked in France at least since sumptuary laws were enacted in the Middle Ages to regulate the consumption and display of wealth and grandeur. As Montaigne astutely pointed out in his essay entitled ‘Des lois somptuaires,’ however, as with anything governed by desire, interdiction only enhanced fashion’s power, and sumptuary laws in France lost their teeth well before the National Assembly abolished them in 1793 (Fairchilds, 2000 419). By the nineteenth century, sumptuary laws had long been replaced by fashion’s own laws; endlessly changeable rules dictated by the oracles of a fashion press vying for advertising revenues were anxiously followed by a public of women and men eager to situate themselves within a shifting social landscape. Distinction was the new, more nuanced bras de fer, and fashion was its velvet glove. Fashion’s soft power thus functioned not only as the foreign policy tool of France’s political and economic will, as it had been so deftly deployed by French monarchs for centuries to ensure the success of domestic production and colonial expansion, but now it had also penetrated the domestic zone to shape French society, politics, national identity, gender roles, and history itself. The term ‘soft power’ originated as a political theory used to explain how attractiveness and forms of cultural branding can co-opt, influence, and dominate social and national behaviours. While it may have its roots in the discourse of diplomacy, the term can also be fruitfully applied to an exploration of the ways in which fashion operated on people and shaped their behaviour, especially in the nineteenth century, when more ostensible power structures had been relegated to the realm of the ‘ancien.’ The machinations of soft power worked through the nineteenth-century French fashion system in a variety of ways, from military optics and gender politics to commercial alliances and emerging national discourses, sometimes empowering those with marginal or dubious power, but sometimes also consolidating or reflecting the regulatory powers that be. This special issue of Dix-Neuf adopts the concept of ‘soft power’ to elaborate an important vector of influence and potential resistance in nineteenth-century France: fashion discourse in its multiple forms, whether material, linguistic, visual, or epistemological. For, as the articles published here show, fashion details—from accessories and undergarments to the cut of a coat, easily overlooked but omnipresent in literature, visual and material culture, political strategy, commercial enterprise, and even historical constructions of nationhood—intersected with and shaped in key ways the evolving