Professor Clare Crowston
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
crowston@uiuc.edu
BA McGill University 1988; Ph.D. Cornell, 1996. Author of "Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791" (Duke University Press, 2001).
Rose Bertin and the Fashioning of the Modern
My paper will examine Rose Bertin, fashion merchant to Marie Antoinette and in many ways the first icon of the fashion industry. My paper will draw on my current book project, entitled "Accounting for Rose Bertin: Credit, Fashion, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century France." For the conference paper, I will interrogate representations of Bertin and her career in eighteenth-century print culture, placing these representations within the context of the emerging fashion industry and press. I will examine how Bertin self-consciously crafted and manipulated her image through the words she spoke in her shop, her comportment with the queen, and her advertising strategies. I will also discuss the elements of Bertin's image that appear to have escaped her control, in ways that underline the ambiguous status of fashion and commercial culture in this period. Throughout the paper, I will highlight the impact of gender and sexuality on Bertin's reputation and her capacity for self-representation. If we can agree that fashion is a constitutive element of modernity, Bertin's significance goes beyond her talents as a creative and commercial innovator; the strategies of self-fashioning she elaborated for herself and her clients helped shape the modern world.
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