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French Fashion, Women, and the First World War
Opens September 5, 2019
Closes January 5, 2020
Bard Graduate Center Gallery
18 West 86th Street
Add a tour of Bard Graduate Center Gallery’s French Fashion, Women, and the First World War, to your fall 2019 syllabus. The exhibition presents the fraught and dynamic relationship between fashion, war, and gender politics in France during World War I; the role women and the clothing industry played in keeping the French economy afloat; and the rise of Paris’s leading female designers, including Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel.
With its diverse range of clothing and ephemera, the exhibition demonstrates how fashion reflected social change and became the locus of male anxiety in the face of rapid social upheaval. What role did fashion play in the disjunction between the horrors of the front experienced by French soldiers, resulting in almost 1.5 million dead, and the reality of life in wartime, in which women worked valiantly to provide for their families and contribute to the war effort? Can the endless critical discourse around what women wore, how they wore it, and the anxieties it provoked explain the stilted progress of women’s emancipation in postwar France, where women did not gain the right to vote until 1944?
The exhibition includes wartime skirt suits, nurses’ and ambulance attendants’ uniforms, mourning dresses, and “military-style” hats, along with fashions by Chanel and Lanvin that are making their first appearance in the United States. In addition, printed documents—postcards, commercial catalogues, fashion magazines, advertising posters, and photographs—that have rarely, if ever, been previously exhibited—will be on view.
French Fashion, Women, and the First World War provides rich contextual material illustrating tensions within the couture industry during the period, notably the major strike of 1917 by fashion house workers; the idealization and criticism of nurses and their uniforms; changes in mourning etiquette; the efforts of the couturiers, during wartime disorder, to protect and promote their interests abroad; and the suffrage movement, which advanced in the United States and Britain immediately following 1918, but stalled in France.
For more information call 212.501.3013 or email tours@bgc.bard.edu.
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