Fashioning the City

Book excerpt: While much attention has been paid to the making of Paris in the work of writers and artists, little is known about the city as defined and created by the fashion media. Filling this gap in studies of the French capital, this original and illuminating book focuses on how the French fashion press - with its rich conjunction of words and images - has been able to construct Paris as a leading world fashion city.Based in an original analysis of fashion writing and images in contemporary French fashion magazines and newspapers, the book shows how 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 imaginary. Agnes 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.