Susan Hiner | Vassar College (original) (raw)
Books by Susan Hiner
Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in 19th-C France, 2023
This cultural history describes the women workers of the French fashion industry in the nineteent... more This cultural history describes the women workers of the French fashion industry in the nineteenth century, first the world of les petites mains (little hands), and then the fashion columnists and illustrators—“fashion’s eyes and ears.” The story is foundational for the industry that endures to this day. At its origins, of course, the industry was practically revolutionary, for it involved immense social upheaval: women who had been compelled by convention to live sequestered lives, were now compelled to take work, and hence to enter the public sphere—and to negotiate the boundary between invisibility and visibility. Behind the Seams uses the metaphor of seams—equating hiddenness with respectability—to reveal a story more complex than previously acknowledged. Behind the Seams ushers women workers and their work out of obscurity and asks that we rethink women’s relation to fashion as one not only of passive consumption, but also, importantly, of productive agency and self-determination.
Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France, 2010
Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmer... more Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period.
As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman's paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it.
Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the "accessory" status—in terms of both complicity and subordination—of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.
Papers by Susan Hiner
Dix Neuf, 2014
Abstract This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an hom... more Abstract This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an homage to the delicate beauty of nineteenth-century femininity, should be read instead as a satire of that very ideal. Through a subtle dialogue between two popular ‘feminized’ genres — the flower book and the fashion plate — Grandville’s illustrations of flower-ladies portray the natural world as a socialized and commodified space and disrupt the prevailing ideology of feminine pudeur that those visual genres worked to construct and maintain. Grandville’s animated flowers offer a social commentary through a persistent juxtaposition of these two benign genres and produce a comically disturbing effect that questions the roles that bourgeois culture had prescribed as natural for women. Through his exaggerated commingling of natural and cultural visual rhetorics, Grandville proposes a decoupling of the natural and the cultural, thus initiating an ideological critique of the most potent discourses around the feminine in nineteenth-century France.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 2012
ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-Century French Studies
![Research paper thumbnail of CHRONIQUEUSES DE MODE : France (XIX e siècle) [encyclopedia entry]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/57587379/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Au XIX e siècle, les chroniqueuses de mode en France sont nombreuses et prolifiques. Après le suc... more Au XIX e siècle, les chroniqueuses de mode en France sont nombreuses et prolifiques. Après le succès du premier grand journal de mode de l'époque, Le Journal des dames et des modes (1797-1839) de Pierre de la Mésangère, de nombreuses publications du même type sont apparues, qui reprennent le même format : planches en couleur accompagnées de descriptions, chronique des modes comprenant potins mondains, courts textes littéraires, et revues de théâtre, d'art et de littérature. La chronique de mode prend très souvent la forme d'une correspondance, établissant alors une sorte d'intimité avec la lectrice, lui révélant les secrets de l'élégance et les habitudes du grand monde, et lui prodiguant des conseils sur l'art de s'habiller et de se tenir en société. La chroniqueuse de mode a des tâches multiples. Elle doit écrire une « causerie de la mode » établissant un lien entre les modes du jour et une forme de savoir-vivre particulièrement prisée par un public de plus en plus désireux de faire partie de la haute société. Il lui faut également offrir des explications pratiques aux femmes qui souhaitent confectionner chez elles certains vêtements de mode, ou des renseignements sur les endroits où l'on peut se procurer des « articles de nouveautés ». La chroniqueuse de mode dépeint en outre le grand monde à un public qui se trouve éloigné (géographiquement ou socialement) des cercles mondains parisiens. Elle détermine le « comme-il-faut » de la toilette dans toutes les circonstances de la vie d'une femme de la bourgeoisie. Elle décrit enfin de façon méticuleuse les gravures de mode en couleur qui se trouvent dans la plupart des journaux de mode. in Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices, Volume 2, ed. Antoinette Fouque, Béatrice Didier, Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: des femmes)
French Cultural Studies for the 21st Century, 2017
edited by Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O'Neil Henry
A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion, series ed. Susan Vincent, vol. 5 ed. Amy Baxter, 2016
In the twilight of a Paris evening, the colonne Vendôme rises in the background, and twinkling sh... more In the twilight of a Paris evening, the colonne Vendôme rises in the background, and twinkling shops close for the night as groups of smartly-dressed women stroll along the rue de la Paix, some released from their day's work at the Maison Paquin, one of the premier fashion houses of the Belle Epoque, and others perhaps patrons of that same shop. Jean Béraud, known for painting Paris street scenes from the seat of his carriage, captures the bustle of quitting time for the seamstresses of Paris's elite couturiers at the turn of the twentieth century, when approximately 90,000 women worked in the French fashion industry, many in couture ateliers on this very street .1). 1 To the right, "Paquin" appears in gold letters over the storefront atelier and showroom of Jeanne Paquin, a celebrated female designer in a domain largely dominated by men. The word "modes" appears on both sides of the back corner building just beneath the illuminated window in the distant left of the painting, which depicts the rue de la Paix as one of Paris's most illustrious fashion streets, where one could find the House of Worth at number 7, along with Doucet, Cartier, and other luxury houses.
Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade, ed. Simon Kelly and Esther Bell, 2017
In the popular imagery representing the modiste, les petites mains (the little hands) of this pre... more In the popular imagery representing the modiste, les petites mains (the little hands) of this premier artisanal worker complemented a performative flirtation. " Real " skills and handiwork with raw materials combined fruitfully with a reputation imagined and developed over time as a coquettish seductress in order to market fashionability to an expanding consumer class in nineteenth-century France. 1 And as the epigram illustrates, even in a manual that acknowledges the desperate situation of fashion workers, the actual labor and status of the modiste vanishes behind a popular conception that took hold in the era of high fashion. Parisian modistes have a long and storied history. It should properly be called a mythology, since the history of the modiste has yet to be written, and most of what we know can be gleaned primarily from popular representa-tions—both visual and literary—of this figure who was central to the identity of Paris as the capital of luxury fashion S u S a n h i n e r
Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, 2014
This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an homage to th... more This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed
as an homage to the delicate beauty of nineteenth-century femininity, should
be read instead as a satire of that very ideal. Through a subtle dialogue
between two popular ‘feminized’ genres — the flower book and the fashion
plate — Grandville’s illustrations of flower-ladies portray the natural world
as a socialized and commodified space and disrupt the prevailing ideology
of feminine pudeur that those visual genres worked to construct and maintain.
Grandville’s animated flowers offer a social commentary through a
persistent juxtaposition of these two benign genres and produce a comically
disturbing effect that questions the roles that bourgeois culture had
prescribed as natural for women. Through his exaggerated commingling of
natural and cultural visual rhetorics, Grandville proposes a decoupling of the
natural and the cultural, thus initiating an ideological critique of the most
potent discourses around the feminine in nineteenth-century France.
West 86th: , 2012
This article argues that the figure of the calicot, a cloth salesman who became ubiquitous in nin... more This article argues that the figure of the calicot, a cloth salesman who became ubiquitous in nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture, crystallized social anxieties surrounding both class mobility and gender fluidity. Tracing the emergence of the caricatured calicot in relation to textile history and a burgeoning mass culture, the article investigates the meanings of the ridicule heaped upon this cultural type in both print and images and articulates a shift in the construction of masculine honor from battlefield prowess to commercial success. At once effeminate and dangerously seductive, the calicot as commercial fop became the site of unease within the rapidly shifting social landscape of Restoration France (1815–30). But by the Second Empire (1852–70), as the mixing of social classes became more widely accepted, and as the fashion economy became more democratized, the calicot faded as a target of satire and was transformed into a deeply ambivalent figure of modernity.
Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Jan 1, 2008
Romance Studies, Jan 1, 2007
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2005
Nineteenth-century French studies, Jan 1, 2002
Confrontations: politics and aesthetics in nineteenth- …, Jan 1, 2001
Paris Pastoral: Re-figuring Anarchy in Zola's Fin de Siecle SUSAN HINER Abstract: Severa... more Paris Pastoral: Re-figuring Anarchy in Zola's Fin de Siecle SUSAN HINER Abstract: Several months before the publication of" J'Accuse...!" in January l898, Zola's final novel in the cycle of Les Trois Villes made its serial debut. The noveI's plot of anarchism makes explicit the ...
Romance Studies, 2013
This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy (J.J.), editor-... more This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de
Pussy (J.J.), editor-in-chief and columnist for the long-running Journal des
Demoiselles (1833–96), vis-à-vis the dominant ideology of the feminine in
nineteenth-century France. From 1833 to her retirement in 1853, J.J., a selfsupporting
and mature divorcée living alone, presented herself as a jeune
fille who lived at home with her parents and corresponded about the latest
fashions and trends with an anonymous and imaginary reader. This article
argues that, in spite of the journal’s markedly conservative tenor as a vehicle
for promoting respectable femininity and its explicit aim to prepare young
girls for bourgeois marriage, the columns of its principal spokeswoman can
be read as the expression of an alternative agenda centred in female sociability
and autonomy. Analysing fashion plates and sewing patterns alongside
sample columns from the twenty-year span of J.J.’s ‘Correspondance’, the
article traces the idea of literal and figurative ‘reflectivity’ to investigate J.J.’s
mixing of surface and subtextual messages.
Reviews by Susan Hiner
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2015
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2016
Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in 19th-C France, 2023
This cultural history describes the women workers of the French fashion industry in the nineteent... more This cultural history describes the women workers of the French fashion industry in the nineteenth century, first the world of les petites mains (little hands), and then the fashion columnists and illustrators—“fashion’s eyes and ears.” The story is foundational for the industry that endures to this day. At its origins, of course, the industry was practically revolutionary, for it involved immense social upheaval: women who had been compelled by convention to live sequestered lives, were now compelled to take work, and hence to enter the public sphere—and to negotiate the boundary between invisibility and visibility. Behind the Seams uses the metaphor of seams—equating hiddenness with respectability—to reveal a story more complex than previously acknowledged. Behind the Seams ushers women workers and their work out of obscurity and asks that we rethink women’s relation to fashion as one not only of passive consumption, but also, importantly, of productive agency and self-determination.
Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France, 2010
Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmer... more Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period.
As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman's paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it.
Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the "accessory" status—in terms of both complicity and subordination—of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.
Dix Neuf, 2014
Abstract This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an hom... more Abstract This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an homage to the delicate beauty of nineteenth-century femininity, should be read instead as a satire of that very ideal. Through a subtle dialogue between two popular ‘feminized’ genres — the flower book and the fashion plate — Grandville’s illustrations of flower-ladies portray the natural world as a socialized and commodified space and disrupt the prevailing ideology of feminine pudeur that those visual genres worked to construct and maintain. Grandville’s animated flowers offer a social commentary through a persistent juxtaposition of these two benign genres and produce a comically disturbing effect that questions the roles that bourgeois culture had prescribed as natural for women. Through his exaggerated commingling of natural and cultural visual rhetorics, Grandville proposes a decoupling of the natural and the cultural, thus initiating an ideological critique of the most potent discourses around the feminine in nineteenth-century France.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 2012
ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Au XIX e siècle, les chroniqueuses de mode en France sont nombreuses et prolifiques. Après le suc... more Au XIX e siècle, les chroniqueuses de mode en France sont nombreuses et prolifiques. Après le succès du premier grand journal de mode de l'époque, Le Journal des dames et des modes (1797-1839) de Pierre de la Mésangère, de nombreuses publications du même type sont apparues, qui reprennent le même format : planches en couleur accompagnées de descriptions, chronique des modes comprenant potins mondains, courts textes littéraires, et revues de théâtre, d'art et de littérature. La chronique de mode prend très souvent la forme d'une correspondance, établissant alors une sorte d'intimité avec la lectrice, lui révélant les secrets de l'élégance et les habitudes du grand monde, et lui prodiguant des conseils sur l'art de s'habiller et de se tenir en société. La chroniqueuse de mode a des tâches multiples. Elle doit écrire une « causerie de la mode » établissant un lien entre les modes du jour et une forme de savoir-vivre particulièrement prisée par un public de plus en plus désireux de faire partie de la haute société. Il lui faut également offrir des explications pratiques aux femmes qui souhaitent confectionner chez elles certains vêtements de mode, ou des renseignements sur les endroits où l'on peut se procurer des « articles de nouveautés ». La chroniqueuse de mode dépeint en outre le grand monde à un public qui se trouve éloigné (géographiquement ou socialement) des cercles mondains parisiens. Elle détermine le « comme-il-faut » de la toilette dans toutes les circonstances de la vie d'une femme de la bourgeoisie. Elle décrit enfin de façon méticuleuse les gravures de mode en couleur qui se trouvent dans la plupart des journaux de mode. in Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices, Volume 2, ed. Antoinette Fouque, Béatrice Didier, Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: des femmes)
French Cultural Studies for the 21st Century, 2017
edited by Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O'Neil Henry
A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion, series ed. Susan Vincent, vol. 5 ed. Amy Baxter, 2016
In the twilight of a Paris evening, the colonne Vendôme rises in the background, and twinkling sh... more In the twilight of a Paris evening, the colonne Vendôme rises in the background, and twinkling shops close for the night as groups of smartly-dressed women stroll along the rue de la Paix, some released from their day's work at the Maison Paquin, one of the premier fashion houses of the Belle Epoque, and others perhaps patrons of that same shop. Jean Béraud, known for painting Paris street scenes from the seat of his carriage, captures the bustle of quitting time for the seamstresses of Paris's elite couturiers at the turn of the twentieth century, when approximately 90,000 women worked in the French fashion industry, many in couture ateliers on this very street .1). 1 To the right, "Paquin" appears in gold letters over the storefront atelier and showroom of Jeanne Paquin, a celebrated female designer in a domain largely dominated by men. The word "modes" appears on both sides of the back corner building just beneath the illuminated window in the distant left of the painting, which depicts the rue de la Paix as one of Paris's most illustrious fashion streets, where one could find the House of Worth at number 7, along with Doucet, Cartier, and other luxury houses.
Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade, ed. Simon Kelly and Esther Bell, 2017
In the popular imagery representing the modiste, les petites mains (the little hands) of this pre... more In the popular imagery representing the modiste, les petites mains (the little hands) of this premier artisanal worker complemented a performative flirtation. " Real " skills and handiwork with raw materials combined fruitfully with a reputation imagined and developed over time as a coquettish seductress in order to market fashionability to an expanding consumer class in nineteenth-century France. 1 And as the epigram illustrates, even in a manual that acknowledges the desperate situation of fashion workers, the actual labor and status of the modiste vanishes behind a popular conception that took hold in the era of high fashion. Parisian modistes have a long and storied history. It should properly be called a mythology, since the history of the modiste has yet to be written, and most of what we know can be gleaned primarily from popular representa-tions—both visual and literary—of this figure who was central to the identity of Paris as the capital of luxury fashion S u S a n h i n e r
Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, 2014
This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed as an homage to th... more This article argues that J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs animées, long dismissed
as an homage to the delicate beauty of nineteenth-century femininity, should
be read instead as a satire of that very ideal. Through a subtle dialogue
between two popular ‘feminized’ genres — the flower book and the fashion
plate — Grandville’s illustrations of flower-ladies portray the natural world
as a socialized and commodified space and disrupt the prevailing ideology
of feminine pudeur that those visual genres worked to construct and maintain.
Grandville’s animated flowers offer a social commentary through a
persistent juxtaposition of these two benign genres and produce a comically
disturbing effect that questions the roles that bourgeois culture had
prescribed as natural for women. Through his exaggerated commingling of
natural and cultural visual rhetorics, Grandville proposes a decoupling of the
natural and the cultural, thus initiating an ideological critique of the most
potent discourses around the feminine in nineteenth-century France.
West 86th: , 2012
This article argues that the figure of the calicot, a cloth salesman who became ubiquitous in nin... more This article argues that the figure of the calicot, a cloth salesman who became ubiquitous in nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture, crystallized social anxieties surrounding both class mobility and gender fluidity. Tracing the emergence of the caricatured calicot in relation to textile history and a burgeoning mass culture, the article investigates the meanings of the ridicule heaped upon this cultural type in both print and images and articulates a shift in the construction of masculine honor from battlefield prowess to commercial success. At once effeminate and dangerously seductive, the calicot as commercial fop became the site of unease within the rapidly shifting social landscape of Restoration France (1815–30). But by the Second Empire (1852–70), as the mixing of social classes became more widely accepted, and as the fashion economy became more democratized, the calicot faded as a target of satire and was transformed into a deeply ambivalent figure of modernity.
Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Jan 1, 2008
Romance Studies, Jan 1, 2007
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2005
Nineteenth-century French studies, Jan 1, 2002
Confrontations: politics and aesthetics in nineteenth- …, Jan 1, 2001
Paris Pastoral: Re-figuring Anarchy in Zola's Fin de Siecle SUSAN HINER Abstract: Severa... more Paris Pastoral: Re-figuring Anarchy in Zola's Fin de Siecle SUSAN HINER Abstract: Several months before the publication of" J'Accuse...!" in January l898, Zola's final novel in the cycle of Les Trois Villes made its serial debut. The noveI's plot of anarchism makes explicit the ...
Romance Studies, 2013
This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy (J.J.), editor-... more This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de
Pussy (J.J.), editor-in-chief and columnist for the long-running Journal des
Demoiselles (1833–96), vis-à-vis the dominant ideology of the feminine in
nineteenth-century France. From 1833 to her retirement in 1853, J.J., a selfsupporting
and mature divorcée living alone, presented herself as a jeune
fille who lived at home with her parents and corresponded about the latest
fashions and trends with an anonymous and imaginary reader. This article
argues that, in spite of the journal’s markedly conservative tenor as a vehicle
for promoting respectable femininity and its explicit aim to prepare young
girls for bourgeois marriage, the columns of its principal spokeswoman can
be read as the expression of an alternative agenda centred in female sociability
and autonomy. Analysing fashion plates and sewing patterns alongside
sample columns from the twenty-year span of J.J.’s ‘Correspondance’, the
article traces the idea of literal and figurative ‘reflectivity’ to investigate J.J.’s
mixing of surface and subtextual messages.