Research Summary
Research Summary
Re-Producing Exclusivity: A History of the Transatlantic Fashion Industry, 1929-1960
Description
The history of fashion has been increasingly explored over the last decade, but two important and intertwined features of the topic are still underdeveloped: business and its international aspect. These dimensions are crucial. Fashion is first and foremost an industry of exportation. Between the wars, the tension between design creativity and business is an important feature for understanding the challenges faced by the industry. This tension was most evident in the case of the interchange between Paris and New York, the first considered the international creative fashion center and the second considered its commercial counterpart. It was often stated that the cities were so different that fashion could not be defined in the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. Until the 1960s, Paris was mostly producing Haute Couture garments made-to-measure for wealthy private customers and purchased by the international fashion business for wide-scale reproduction. I show in this study that beyond this structure, multiple processes of cross-fertilization were at work between both cities allowing for the formation of a single industry based mostly on small-scale enterprises. The exchanges reached their highest pitch with regard to the delicate issue of copyrighting couture designs. The attitudes, and the strategies that grew out of them, of the Paris and New York industries with regard to commerce and more precisely with regard to legal reproduction and illegal copying are investigated through the activity of employer syndicates and lobbies, in relation to enterprise and government. This research addresses the interdependence between the French and American fashion industries and markets during three successive periods of crises: the Depression, WWII, and the post-war reconstruction. Understanding how the industry survived these three crises is crucial to understanding the development of its contemporary structure.