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Justine De Young, "The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Welcome.
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Justine DeYoung about her book titled the Art of Parisian Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2025. And really takes us into quite a key moment, I think, in the fashioning of modern public selves and public images, which is obviously such a key part of our world today. And obviously things like Instagram definitely make a difference in how all that works in today's culture. But as this book helps us understand, we can actually go back in time over a hundred years. To the 1800s, in fact, to understand that this sort of self fashioning wasn't just something that was up for queens and kings. This was something that a lot of different kinds of people were doing in places like Paris, and in very intentional ways that were understood at the time as being coded in all sorts of different meanings. I mean, the same way that today we see certain articles of clothing or poses or ways in which an image is constructed and we can sort of read them. This book helps us do that in Paris in the 1800s as well, which is a really interesting trip back into time that makes me quite excited about this conversation. So, Justine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and telling us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Sure, I'd be happy to. I'm a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in the art history department. So I teach both fashion history and art history classes. I'm trained as an art historian. My PhD from Northwestern is in art history. And I came to the topic because I had a frustration in reading a lot of art history about the 19th century. And that was that there were many, many times when you're reading along, an author will say something like, and she wears a fashionable dress of the period, but doesn't provide any evidence of that. And so that really, that sort of gap in what was being asserted and actually the evidence that was being provided really jumped out at me and frustrated me. And I think, you know, there's many reasons why that's true. But we have a tendency now when we look back to see any dress that looks sort of fancy and pretty to us and assume that it was fashionable. But what I aimed to do when I was doing research was to discover whether or not in fact, these dresses were fashionable. And in fact, what you find when you look at the fashion plates, fashion magazines of the day, or, you know, you read salon reviews, in fact, critics often remark about the lack of fashionability in an outfit. And that was really central to the meaning of the painting and to how they interpreted it. And so it really felt like an important gap in the field that I think this book fills, that it enables people to look back into the past with a bit of a period eye to understand although the women may look beautiful and pretty and fashionable to us at the time, some of them were actually quite out of step with fashion. And also when I was reading the reviews, you often discover critics are judging these women based on stereotypes. Of the time. So they're judging how they. How well they live up to a certain stereotype. And that also then led to or was central to gauging the success or failure of the artwork. So it seemed very essential to sort of understand these stereotypes, which were often rather alien. I remember the first time I came across mention of the sexy widow, the young widow, the attractive widow, it really sort of shocked me. But that was true sort of across the board. A lot of the stereotypes are sort of different than ones we might have today. There was actually a lot of admiration for mistresses, whereas today we often look at them a bit askance and women on horseback, which I think are quite banal in contemporary society and maybe still just have an aristocratic association. At the time, there was a lot of questioning of who these women were and of their morality. And so I really was aiming in the book to sort of help the modern day reader understand why paintings that look very normal and maybe inoffensive today were offensive or far more intriguing to period audiences.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a really helpful introduction to the book because that's so much what you're trying to do is not just show us the images that existed then, but help us understand how they were being seen and understood and contextualised. And a key part of that, as you've mentioned already, is these kind of stereotypes or sort of normative ideals that women are being judged against. And you've mentioned a few of them there already, but could you maybe sort of list them out for us, the types that you examine in the book and why you decided to focus on these?
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes. So the book examines five fashionable types of women in the second half of the 19th century. The first is the cocotte, which is a French slang for the extravagant mistress, so we might call her the courtesan today. The second is the genevre, or the sort of young sexy widow. The third is the Amazon, so the very independent equestrian who's mysteriously moving through the city. We don't know where she's come from or where she's going. The fourth type is the Demoiselle de Magasin, which is a shop girl. But in this case I really focus in on the department store sales girl because they were a particular fascination at the time. And the final type is perhaps the most familiar and that is the archetypal figure of the Parisienne. So this chic woman who has a je ne sais quoi that became the symbol of Paris. I chose to focus on those five because in this period, fashionable women were the most Difficult to classify. So we have mass production and rising incomes leading to mass production or mass consumption of fashionable goods. And so women of other. Of multiple classes could dress fashionably for the first time. We'll talk more, I think, later, about the democratization of fashion. But these five types were sort of. The fashionable types were some of the most discussed and most fascinating to period audiences because they were trying to test their skills at identification and see if they could figure out what type of woman these fashionable women were. Because, of course, it didn't have to do just with what one wore, but also with how one moved, how one behaved with one's comportment in public. And so they're really trying to diagnose everything about a woman just from looking at her. And so those that made them particularly fascinating then, I think particularly fascinating now as well. These types were also very fluid because unlike other types which might have been linked to occupation, like a flower seller or a rag picker or a laundress, these were often temporary types. You know, one didn't ride horses all of the time. And the mistress, you know, it wasn't a universal role. And one that one could dress as a mistress or one could actually, you know, dress as a wife. Our wives, in fact, could dress as mistresses in terms of the period expectations. And so it was really a lot of. There was a lot of interest in the period and a lot of artists and caricaturists were focusing on these particular types. Finally, they were the most aspirational and the most important for projecting status. So, as Miranda, you pointed out, the book really looks at this culture of image making and of self fashioning. And these were sort of aspirational types that one might want to fashion oneself after. So the mistress was really respected for her extravagance, her seductive power, her luxurious fashions. The young widow was admired for her independence because she likely now has an income and is independent of a man. The Amazon had aristocratic associations. Riding a horse is still something that took a lot of lessons. And so if you could learn how to ride a horse, well, you could pass as a member of the aristocracy. The department store shop girl was envied for her fashion savvy. Obviously, she was very much up on the latest trends, but also for her upward mobility. She was one of the highest paid women in this period and so often would move up into the upper middle classes as a result of her employment. And finally, of course, being labeled a Parisienne was the goal of many women in this period for her sort of signature allure. And chic. And so the book really looks at these types, each has its own chapter, and examines them both through paintings that were exhibited at the Salon, but also through photographs looking at fashion plates and also the discourse of the time in newspapers and other venues and books.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is very helpful to have laid out these different types and the kind of ways in which they're clear enough that satirists can play with them and people know what they mean, but also not so fixed that women can't sort of dress up or, you know, between them, as I'm sure we will discuss further. But before we move on, the point you made about the kind of reinvention potential, that's, of course, a key aspect of fashion still today, to the extent that perhaps we might fall into the trap of overemphasizing how true fashion has always been available for that in history. But in fact, you talk about in the book why 19th century Paris was perhaps a particularly key initial moment, maybe where these ideas of reinvention through fashion were perhaps more available than they had been before. So could you tell us a little bit more about kind of this particular moment and its significance?
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes, I'd be happy to. This is an interesting moment in the history of the fashion industry and in the history of humankind, because we do see, as I mentioned, with the rise of mass production, a growing middle class and thus rising incomes, the cost of fashionable goods is falling dramatically. Where in previous centuries, if you wore a luxurious outfit made of silk or covered in gold, it was a much surer signifier of your status. In the 19th century, suddenly even that most expensive decoration, lace, which had cost the most of any ornament that could be applied to a dress, there's even the invention of a lace making machine. And so with the costs of fabrics, of trimmings like lace and all sort of associated goods falling dramatically, not only due to mass production, but also because of the rise of the department store, which is born in this period in the mid-1850s and relied on volume, right, in order to make money. And so they cut their prices and were selling goods much, much more cheaply than in the past. And so for the first time, women, even of the lower classes, could afford to buy new fabrics more common or more, more often than they ever would have been able to in the past. They could follow the latest silhouettes. There was a whole host of fashion literature that grew up fashion magazines, dozens and dozens of them at every sort of price point and aimed at all different sorts of audiences. And in those fashion magazines, they would illustrate the latest fashions. So this fashion knowledge became accessible. It wasn't solely at court. You could learn about fashion all the way out in the Marquesas. You could learn about fashion in Tokyo, right? What's happening in Paris was suddenly being advertised all around the world. And with those fashion magazines, they even provided paper patterns. So you could take those patterns and make a dress yourself using a fabric that you bough at a department store. So even if you're not wearing the absolute fanciest fabrics, you could create a very fashionable silhouette for you. And that is well illustrated by the fact that the sort of first universal fashion trend for women is the adoption of the crinoline cage. So those steel hoops that women are hoop skirts that women use to support their skirts, they were worn at all levels of society because the steel was not that expensive. And you only really needed one, right? You could wear it under all of your gowns. So we really do see a surge in women dressing fashionably. And this causes a bit of unease in Paris. Paris by this point is almost 2 million people. And so we have these sort of characteristic large urban crowds where one could be anonymous. So when people in Paris might have previously stayed in their neighborhoods, there's also now unprecedented movement around the city. There's lot of a omnibus service that by the 1860s is transporting more than 100 million passengers a year. So people are moving through the city more than ever before. We're also seeing more life lived in public. So as some people may know, under the emperor Napoleon iii, he transformed Paris with broad new boulevards, and he transformed the royal parks into public ones. And so women and men were on the streets, you know, in the parks, being seeing and being seen far more than ever before. And so there was an incentive, right, that you could impress not only your friends, but also people unknown to you as you moved through the city. And it also gave you a relative freedom because not everyone would know who you were, right? So the way that you dressed became the person that you were and the way that you acted. We also, even in this period, have more innovations that end up driving the fashion industry. And it's adoption by a variety of classes. So we see the birth of ready to wear. So up until this period, every dress was custom made for women at all different levels of society. But we start to see the rise of pre made gowns that, that, that could be bought in the store that followed the, the characteristic silhouette and often sold for less than it would cost for you to get it made yourself. And this sort of innovation was in part aided by the sewing machine, which also comes in the mid 19th century and is widely adopted, in part because of the extension of credit and installment payment plans. So we have women buying sewing machines or groups of women buying sewing machines, and it rapidly increases their ability to produce fashionable goods at quite a place, either for themselves or professionally. So it really was a moment when women could dress far more fashionably for far more cheaply than ever before. And that led to a great deal of confusion. So we see that the rise of these stereotypes as a way of coping with this sort of unfamiliar landscape. We have all of these women on the streets of Paris. And when you read actually travel guides to Paris, they often remark on the fact there's way more women on the streets of Paris than there are other cities even. And so it's a somewhat bewildering landscape if you're wanting to know and identify people as you pass them. And men and women did, right? They wanted to be able to know how they should interact or if they should interact. You know, it's classically. Often a man wants to know who's. Who he's allowed to seduce, right? He doesn't. He doesn't want to mistakenly try to seduce a proper bourgeois wife. But it was a. More generally that there was this sort of curiosity and that almost became a bit of a. A game, right? Or urban pastime to identify the type of types and make assumptions about who they are based on the way they're dressing and how they're behaving.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this is really helpful for understanding, I think, so many elements of it. The kind of economic, the technological. But as you were just telling us there, the kind of psychological, like, human behavior side, right? Like we all like looking at other people and making up stories about them. Again, very relatable to where we're at now. But one aspect, perhaps, that is worth drawing out from what you've implicitly implied, There is another effect of having all of this access to clothes and kind of the incentive to. You're going out more, you have more places to wear things at, and more reasons to be able to do this reinvention with going to different places. What does this mean for the pace of fashion changing? Why is that linked all of these things you've just told us to. That pace increasing?
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes, that's a great question. So as a consequence of this new accessibility of this democratization of fashion, the pace of fashion increases dramatically. The accessibility of not only the clothes, but the knowledge about what are the latest trends, thanks to the fashion periodicals and the publishing industry. And the lower costs meant that fashion was no longer securely identifying people based on their actual position in society. Right. It detracted from fashion's hierarchy, hierarchizing power. And so the pace of fashion accelerates. So we start to see what we would call today sort of micro trends. And in part, I think this was also driven by the fashion magazines in this period. They were weekly, and so they really had to report on what they saw that was new. But whether or not these new micro trends were actually ones that were widely adopted, it's something that actually letters to the editor protest. So it's interesting to see that there's some acknowledgment in the period that surely these trends can't be widely adopted in only the space of a week. But we do see the industry producing new styles and shifting, particularly if you know anything about 19th century fashion, the silhouette of dresses starts to change very rapidly. We go from the hoop skirts to a bustle, then we go extremely narrow into sort of a columner princess silhouette that we go back to a big bustle. Then we go to a bell skirt. So we really do see a sort of bewildering shift of the fashionable silhouette, which, of course demanded a certain level of income. Right. If you're going to have to suddenly get all of your cut, your dresses cut in a different shape to fit a different under structure. And there was also, at this time, though, a shift in the discourse. So this idea that chasing after the latest trends is maybe not the best thing to do, and maybe it actually betrays a lack of personal style. And we see in this period a real rise of this idea of taste and of developing one's personal style. So taste, which meant dressing appropriately for the occasion and also to flatter one's own appearance, becomes a marker of class in the same way that merely wearing fashionable goods had in the past. So fashion journals sought to sort of be a shortcut to taste. They would explain what was tasteful and what was not. But taste, I think, also comes in because in the Second Empire, we see so many very fashionable courtesans rise to quite a bit of prominence in the society. And they had the. The income, of course, to completely change their looks week to week, to order, you know, dozens of dresses a year. And so you see this sort of maybe reassertion of power by women in the fashion periodical industry and the. The writing industry that, that they are actually the arbiters, right? They're going to say what they. What's what's good taste, but also, you know, aristocratic women want to say that they of course, have better taste than these cortisons. And so we see also a nervousness around taste that we have in these letters to the fashion magazines, a lot of concern over whether or not what they are planning on wearing is appropriate for the moment, what they should wear for a certain occasion, whatever, what are the latest trimmings. So the fashion magazines become that, that sort of ultimate arbiter, which is of course great for their subscription rates. And we do see subscription rates soar in this period. The circulation numbers more than, I think, quintuple from the first, first half of the 19th century, in addition to there being far more magazines than ever before. So we have this, this desire to be chic, to have taste, to be able to dress to reflect one's own best features, at the same time that there is this push to constantly keep up with the latest styles.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So all of this sounds very familiar and it's really interesting to see sort of this all beginning, given how prevalent it is now. What I did find, however, more surprising in reading about this in the book was that the pace of fashion seemed to change more in some areas of dress than others, or at least differently. So I wonder if you can talk about all of the things you've just told us about pace and what that meant for mourning clothes particularly.
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes. So in this period, mourning becomes its own industry. So you have shops exclusively devoted to mourning dresses and mourning goods. Because of course, in this period that didn't just mean black dresses, it also meant black, black parasols, black gloves, all sorts, all these sort of accompanying accessories, but even things like black bordered stationery. So there's a whole industry around producing what a woman would need to be properly mournful. And mourning was quite serious in this period. And the fashion journals and mourning houses were producing these very detailed guides about how one has to. How long one has to mourn a second cousin, for example, or how long one mourns a great uncle. And not only is there a black dress, like we would assume, mourning in this period went through several stages. And the advice on this was often fairly contradictory. As I detailed in the book, the number of stages, how long they last, shifts even year to year. So women were constantly in this state of anxiety about whether or not they were properly mourning or appearing to properly mourn. The other shift that's important in terms of taste is that classically mourning dresses had been just plain black dresses. But in this period, mourning is now expected to Follow the latest silhouette. So it meant with especially, you know, the unexpected mourning, that you would have to order completely new mourning gowns, that you wouldn't be able to just pull something out of a drawer because that wouldn't be in the latest style. Right. If you have a crinolined morning gown, it's not going to work when you're in a bustle period. So we see the rise of sort of same day mourning couturiers, which seems incredible. So the elite sort of fashion morning houses could complete custom morning outfits in only 10 or 12 hours. So they would have many women using sewing machines to create these outfits because especially at the more elite level, you would need more than one for each stage. So we see even an expectation in this period that not just the upper classes but also the middle classes should follow fashion, mount morning fashion. But even the lower class begin to adopt some of these mourning trends. So we see a huge growth in the secondary market for widow's clothing. So that women who are exiting one stage of mourning would sell their gowns to women who are now entering it. And women would sell their brightly colored clothes, which they suddenly don't need, to other women. But at the lowest level, we even see, you know, with the invention of of artificial dyes, a lot of poor women are simply dyeing their existing dresses black. So mourning becomes a very visible form of fashionability. Oddly enough that you were expected to properly display when out in public and became one of those types. As I said, the sexy young widow especially was known for her extremely fashionable morning gown. That was something that people were always looking for. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 6D and never miss.
- [29:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [29:09]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
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- [29:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [29:43]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
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- [30:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
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- [30:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is so fascinating to understand because that's really not what we think of sort of today. You know, we don't have those kinds of shops in the same sort of way. We don't see people going around wearing this, we don't wear them ourselves. And yet there are so many aspects of this world that we could still see today. Often we see them in sort of art museums. You know, we look at a painting to go back to where you started our conversation at. And we look at a painting now and we go, oh, that looks nice. Or she looks sort of mean or whatever. And our interpretation of it is not at all really the same as what it would have been at the time. So I wonder if you can illustrate this for us by talking about a particular example you discuss in the book, the painting called Camille. What would audiences at the time have thought of when looking at the painting? What sort of interpretations would they have brought to the woman in it?
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Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes. So I encourage you to Google this painting to look it up. It's painted by the famous artist Claude Monet, but early in his career in the 1860s. It was painted in 1866. It's a portrait, or appears to be a portrait of a woman standing in a very luxurious silk dress. She is wearing a black jacket, so she appears to be out of doors with a striped skirt, which is both green and black, so an alternating striped skirt. And she is walking away from us, but she has turned to look back at us. And this picture is titled Camille, which happens to be the name of Monet's girlfriend of the time who later becomes Camille Monet. So this painting has long been seen as sort of a portrait of Camille, of his girlfriend in the art historical literature. But at the time when you read reviews, it was read quite differently because of course, most people didn't know who Camus was. In fact, very few people knew who Camus was. And so it was read much more generically as a type of woman. And the type of woman here was not just like the innocent middle class girlfriend, but instead the extravagant mistress. So the cocotte that I mentioned earlier, the courtesan. And when you read reviews, it's really Striking to me how unanimous they are. Because, of course, we've been talking about how difficult it was considered to sort of identify women solely based on what they were wearing. And so this sort of uniformity in the reaction was really interesting to me. And so I really dug into this painting and thought about the choices that Monet was making and how he was ensuring that this painting would be read this way because it had to be deliberate. As you start to look at the details, first of all, giving the work the title Camille is highly unusual in this period. Titles of paintings of women typically would be called something like Portrait of Madame. And then, you know, the most famous example is John Singer Sargent's Madame X. Right. But in this period, they were all sort of listed as portraits of Madame in the catalogs. It was indicated by three asterisks, so it wouldn't include her last name. Women were sometimes identifiable just from the. If they were famous society women, like Virginie Gautreau was in Madame X. But in this case, no one recognized Camille because she wasn't a famous society woman. In fact, she's, in fact, playing one. She's playing the extravagant mistress. She was not an extravagant mistress. And we know that because he rented Monet, rented the gown along with his friend Bazi. Frederic Bazi was also painting the gown for his salon painting. And so this points to, of course, the availability, right, that even if you couldn't afford a dress like that, you could perhaps afford to rent it for the day. So she's wearing this rented gown, and this gown is in common. You know, it conforms to the very latest fashion trends. And in addition to that, he has heightened her appearance. He's added two beauty marks and a hint of blush on her cheek. And this is a period when wearing visible makeup was very much associated with the courtesan. All women sort of wore powder, but adding beauty marks, adding blush, adding eyeliner, visible makeup like that, that was very much associated with the type of the courtesan. He also has her glance back, and that sort of significant glance was considered the hallmark of the courtesan, that she would know how to seduce with only a glance, that she would look back and encourage you to follow her. But there's also, as you look deeper, even more reasons that the critics were so convinced she was a courtesan. He's given her a very generic setting. She's sort of disappeared into a vague space. There's no clear markers that would have placed her in a secure domestic context. So originally, he painted the picture with this Large oriental rug. So she would have been considered to be inside an apartment, which would have been slightly more respectable. In this case, she now, since he painted it out, seems to be walking in the street. He also removed some red drapes that had been hanging behind her. So it's really a hard to read space. This made her read even more as a type rather than as the portrait of a specific person. But he also then tied into an aspect of pop culture that, again, we don't have a sense of, because we're not part of the 19th century's popular culture. That was very much au courant at the time. There was a play called the Famille Benoitant by Victorian Sardou. And this play was a sensation while Monet was painting this painting. It follows two bourgeois daughters and their sort of love lives, and they are getting mistaken for courtesans when they go to the races. The sort of. It highlights the sort of sociability and the complexity of social life in this period. But there's a lot of mistaken identities. And the actresses who were playing the characters were actually courtesans themselves, although they were playing women mistaken for courtesans in the play. One of the key, key characters, one of these daughters, was actually named Camille. So I think in the. It would be almost inevitable that people would think of this play. It was, like I said, incredibly popular. They even performed for Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie at court. And he includes fashion trends that had been created by the play. So the play was celebrated for its extremely luxurious costumes, and it launched a host of fashion trends. When you read the fashion coverage for the period, you can sense the sort of exhaustion of the fashion editors who are listing off all the different benoiton style trends that are going on. So in this case, Monet even included one of those trends. So he includes these sort of jet beads, a sort of chain of jet beads alongside Camille's bonnet strings. And these were called benoitin chains. Right. They were part of one of these new innovations. I mean, it wasn't that she was in mourning, even though jet was a sort of mourning fabric, but it was a sort of nice little hint of luxury along the bonnet strings that would have been immediately linked to anyone who was into fashion at the time, to the story of the Benoitant daughters. And so this, at the same time, connected not only to the theatrical world, but in this period as well. There was a really raging debate about women and luxury. This was launched in part by a senator in the French Senate in the summer of 1865. His name was Andre Dupin, and he gave a speech lamenting the unbridled luxury of women. And he particularly blamed the crinoline. That the crinoline and these large crinoline gowns that now, of course, women of all classes are wearing are seducing women into imagining a life of luxury for themselves. And of course, how might they go to achieve that life of luxury? They might seek to become the mistress of a wealthy man. So that he was linking the fashion style to a rise in immorality in Paris. And as a consequence of this debate about unbridled luxury was really debated in the press for months and months. We have articles being written about it, we have letters to the editor by women, by men, deciding whether or not women are actually to blame for this rise in luxury or if men are, where does it come from and what's the solution? And this debate makes it even to the French court. So there's a really remarkable moment when Empress Eugenie decides to stop wearing crinolines. And then of course, immediately everyone else at court stops wearing them as well. This isn't a trend that was picked up by the middle class fashion journals. When you look at fashion plates in this period, it looks like people just keep wearing crinolines the whole time. But it gets very closely remarked in fashion journals that follow the court, that are aimed at a more aristocratic audience, that the crinoline is no longer worn. So we have this period. It's a brief period, but about nine months, when women give up the crinoline. And significantly, Monet, in fact gets rid of Camille's crinoline. She doesn't have a crinoline on in the painting. The skirt drapes far too sort of limply that it doesn't have the sort of bell shaped silhouette you would expect from wearing. Wearing a hoop skirt beneath it. And so that is one of the sort of final signs that this is an extremely fashionable woman because she has given up the crinoline, much like ladies at the court had as well. So it really was a fascinating painting to research because it was so enmeshed in the popular culture. And it really helps explain why critics, critics read the painting the way that they did. It really, you know, tapped into a key debate about women and to the latest sort of fashion trends in a way that they could of course, easily interpret. But it was much more difficult for us today if we're not up on French senatorial proclamations or speeches or rather obscure 19th century theater productions. But it does show that, you know, Monet, you know, he's A young artist at this point is trying to make a name for himself. He's trying to get, catch people's eye. And so I really see the painting is sort of a ripped from the headlines painting that's attempting and succeeds at capturing the public's eye and garnering a great deal of attention for Monet, because his impetus to doing this was of course also to advertise to his skill as a painter. Right. He's able to capture fashionable women, he's able to paint beautiful gowns and simulate the, the appearance of silk, which are key skills for a portraitist. So this young couple is, is, you know, looking to grow their income. And portraiture was definitely one of the key ways that an artist would do that. And so this very large scale, it's a life size portrait of Camille was critical to that establishing of his reputation. And he makes sure, you know, to include all the sort of hallmarks of the courtesan in that painting. The extravagant dress, the significant glance, the ultra fashionability, the lack of crinoline in this moment, along with her sort of what they considered provocative way of walking. So it's really sort of a fascinating case study for a painting that often is read as sort of sweet, like a portrait of his girlfriend at the time was viewed much more salaciously, I would say.
- [43:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you so much for taking us through that case study. It's interesting in and of itself for all of those details that we definitely would not notice today. But also really to illustrate this wider point that we need this kind of research to figure out what's going on. Because our way of reading things today say, misses out clearly loads of things from a painting like that. So thank you for helping us dissect what these sort of ultra fashionable woman would have been read as in that context. I want to pick up though, on another type of woman that you discuss in the book. We mentioned her very briefly earlier and I want to make sure she gets her moment, which is, of course women who rode horses still a thing today, as you said earlier, probably something we generally code as sort of aristocratic or posh, but clearly was a bigger deal at this point in Paris. So why was this a type that elicited fascination and concern?
- [44:42]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes. So up until the mid 19th century, I would say that riding a horse was a very secure, aristocratic signifier, meant that you had access to horses, right. That you knew how to ride. It required a whole set of specialized garments, writing habit. And so it was really just an expense most women couldn't afford. But this starts to change in the mid 19th century for a lot of reasons. One of them is very deliberate. So Empress Eugenie, three months after her marriage to Napoleon iii, poses as an Amazon, that is, as a woman on horseback for a fashion plate, a color fashion plate. This is highly unusual to have the Empress as a fashion plate model. It gets reproduced in all sorts of magazines at all sorts of levels. And pointedly, in that plate, she wears a French riding habit up until this moment. And indeed, it remains somewhat true that, in fact, tailors who produced these riding habits were most often coming out of England. English women were considered to be the true horse women. But Eugenie here is very much staking a claim of the Amazon as a symbol of French fashionability. You know, so much of what she does as the partner of Emperor Napoleon III is to, you know, promote the French fashion industry at court. They had to keep wearing new gowns. You couldn't wear the same gown twice and the same in the same way. Encouraging riding will help stimulate the French tailoring trick trade. But in this period, we also see a surge, not only because of her sort of modeling of this behavior, but because you start to be able to rent horses. So where previously you had to have stables and horses of your own, we have new riding schools that crop up near the new Bois de Boulogne, the big public park to the west of Paris. And so you could go take riding lessons and you could rent. The. Rent a horse for the morning or for the day. So more and more people are able to ride and able to ride in the city. And more to the point, there are new places for riding, right? You could ride along these broad new boulevards. And also, of course, in these new public parks, they in fact redesign the Bois de Boulogne to be specialized for riding with all sorts of different kinds of paths for different kinds of riding, riding. And so we see this big push to get more women to ride. We see the lauding of riding for its health benefits. And so there is a tremendous surge in the number of people who start to ride. I think in part also because it. It remained the hardest sort of fashionable type to actually achieve, because it did require some riding skill. It required a very specialized outfit. But the funny thing about that is that even if you couldn't ride and didn't have the money to rent a horse or to take riding lessons, you could get your photo taken as an Amazon. So you could borrow these photo studios would have riding habits that you could put on, and you could give photos to your friends of yourself as an Amazon, they even had equestrian photo studios so you could get your photo taken on the horse. Horse, even if you couldn't otherwise ride it. So it really becomes a sort of key leisure activity that women of the middle classes thoroughly embrace, along with the sort of women of the aristocracy who always had been riding. Yeah.
- [48:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Again, we're getting a bunch of these threads that we've heard already, right? The idea you can rent things, the idea that you're sort of now looking at something that's been visible but now you can do it yourself. Photographs that you can give to other people. Again, this is all sounding very familiar. So even if the images themselves wouldn't be. So that's definitely helpful to understand. In the same sort of vein, then, could you tell us about another of the types you mentioned earlier of department store shop girls? This seems to be honest, like a very specific type, right. Woman on a horse, as you mentioned, with the Empress Eugenie example, with the Amazon, like that goes back into history, at least to be drawn on. Department store shopgirl, on the other hand, kind of is coming out of nowhere. Like, why is this a specific type amongst the other ones you've told us about?
- [49:16]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
In part because it's the newest type. Right. These figures were very much a fascination because they were so new. So I spoke earlier about the rise of the department stores over the course of the 19th century, and slowly but surely they start to include female saleswomen. And these sales women were considered, of course, to be experts in the latest fashion trends. They were advising women of the middle and upper classes on what they should buy, what they should wear. And so it became a very coveted job for a number of reasons. They were paid a commission. Most importantly, unlike every other kind of shop girl, they earned a commission on their sales. So there really was an incentive to be very experienced and very deft saleswoman and that gradually increased their incomes because they could be selling, you know, 500 franc gowns, right, and they would get between half a percent and 3% of that. So you can imagine over the course of the year that they could make quite an income. And so these women had a lot more disposable income income and so were able to dress a lot more fashionably in their downtime than other women might be able to. But they also had a bunch of other benefits from working in the department store. They were given a sales uniform, a black dress and the sort of latest style. They had an employee discount of 10% and they often lived above the store. So they had free, free lodging and Also free food, the department store, so that they didn't lose time, fed them both lunch and dinner because they were working 13 hour days. So they really had a great deal more income. And so they really came to resemble the middle class and even upper middle class women that they were serving. And there was a lot of anxiety around that, that these women in, in working, these working women were sort of indistinguishable when they were outside the stores from other middle class women. Notably because the department store wanted them to concentrate on sales. They also never had to do deliveries. So a lot of shop girls working in smaller shops would have to deliver garments or hats or whatever they were selling to individuals homes. And that did lead to a sort of suspicion of the sort of morality of these women that, that they're going into people's homes and the idea that they might be seduced when they did so meant that there was sort of a. They were considered a bit of, a bit suspect. But in this case the department stores had their own delivery services. So these women had a better moral reputation and were considered quite respectable. So they were and also very visible in the city. So they were a little bit older than they started work at a slightly older age. They usually entered the store around the age of 20 because they were expected to have worked in smaller stores in order to come to the department store. But they then often didn't marry until their late 20s or early 30s. And in fact that was true across the board in Paris that the marriage age for women in this period was 27. On average it was 32 for men. So a lot older than we might commonly expect expect. And so they were living their lives in, in Paris as single women. They were going out to restaurants in groups. So they were this new, very fashionable set of women that caught a lot of attention. They often typically also came from lower middle class rather than working class backgrounds. Just because they were expected to mix with all levels of society and especially to be able to serve and interact with, with women of the upper classes. And so even if they did come from a working class background, there was this expectation that this time spent in sales to bourgeois and aristocratic clientele shaped the manners, the comportment, the taste of these department store sales girls. So it really was a unique moment. And the job just had a lot of cash bag. And so there's a lot of fascination with these new women.
- [53:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a number of reasons why they would be so much at the center of attention. Thank you for helping us understand what's going on with that type.
- [53:55]
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- [55:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
One thing, though, that we haven't mentioned yet across really any of the types we've discussed the young widow, the cocot, the women riding the Parisienne. How much were these types racially encoded? We've talked a lot about class, but what about race?
- [55:40]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
So that's a great question and one that I try to look into in the book because of course, women of all races were going through these life stages, like becoming widows. They were working in Paris. You know, they were even, of course, sometimes the mistresses of elite men. And so, so it wasn't impossible for women to be in any of these, for women of different races to be in any of these categories. But some were much more difficult. And particularly the figure of the Parisienne, the Parisian as a label to call someone the embodiment of chic and fashionability was a very high bar for all women. But especially as I talk about in the book, I believe for black women women, I talked through one case study of a actress, or not an actress of a singer. Her name was Carlotta Cara. She's frequently described as beautiful, as comme il faut, which is someone who behaves and dresses in line with sort of the formal rules of aristocratic social behavior. There's lots of photographs of her that remain that attest to her fashion ability. But when you read reviews of her performances, while they will praise all of those attributes, her fashionability, her beauty, her, you know, ability to be comme il faut, the critics never will label her a Parisienne. Right. There's. There's a sense that this is a label that is reserved for people that fulfill the French body and beauty ideals of the time. And that. That those body and beauty ideals at the time were very racially encoded, that to be a beautiful Parisienne necessitated white skin. And you read, you get hints of that as you read reviews that praise Parisians for their particularly pale skin, that point out the veins that you can see the artists have painted. So there is this sort of stuff sense that particularly for the Parisienne, that this is not an affirmation of someone's chic that would be granted oftentimes to black women. But it is interesting in the book, as much as I can, I tried to sort of tell the stories of black women in Paris, including looking at a photograph that was recently discovered of Jean Duval, who was famously the mistress of Charles Baudelaire. And it's fascinating because although she was famously a mistress of Baudelaire and later the photographer Nadar, she very much styles herself as a very proper bourgeois woman that the photograph really presents and sort of an impeccable presentation of bourgeois domesticity. So it's interesting to see how women of all races, as we're sort of navigating these types and using them to, you know, self fashion and to advance their own images.
- [58:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, some of the examples you have in the book, I'm glad you highlighted them here. Really kind of help understand in some ways why this was an exciting tightrope to walk, but also why it was quite a tricky one too. So now that we've talked a little bit more about the Parisienne idea, I believe you mentioned towards the beginning of our conversation that this was maybe the hardest ideal for a woman to imagine. So can you tell us more about why this was such a hard type to achieve? I mean, this tightrope seems to have been the trickiest one, right?
- [59:24]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
Definitely. So the Parisienne, it's a little bit confusing because of course, any female resident of Paris would be called a Parisienne in that sense. But to be really labeled the Parisienne or an embodiment of the Parisienne was a rare sort of honor that critics like to bestow on particular women, either for the their appearance in daily life. There's some actresses that frequently are called the Parisienne. White actresses, of course, but also in paintings, right. That they'll say, oh, this is the perfect embodiment of the Parisienne. And the challenge here was that unlike the other types, the Parisienne didn't have a set sort of costume or physical appearance. The things that were the hallmark of the Parisienne were a bit more abstract. They were sort of general idea of fashionability. There's this sort of flirtatiousness and a sort of theatricality to the Parisienne that she is performing and is soliciting or is conscious of being looked at. Right. And so it's. It's somewhat difficult to say you've completely mastered this because of course, it hinges on someone else's approval of you. Right. They have to find you particularly attractive and alluring and believe you have that je ne sais quoi. They even use that expression in this period that the Parisienne has this je ne sais quoi. Like, I don't know what quality about them. And that's of course, like, how do I. I'm going to go out and be je ne sais quoi. I mean, it's. It's not something that is easy to achieve. And they also are holding you to the very strictest in order. The women that get labeled la Parisienne are always in conformation or in conforming to the body and beauty ideals that we were saying before. Pale skin, a small nose, a very per bust, a slender waistline. So it became very hard for women to achieve it and nonetheless became the sort of celebrated image of a French woman. Right. It remains actually an icon of the city today. Right. We see there's the global luxury conglomerates are still pushing out this idea of French women as being particularly chic, particularly appealing, alluring, and to have this very sort of mastery of fashion and also though of a way of living, a sophistication that is desirable. And so living up to that reputation was of course a challenge. But the type was also very appealing, right. Because it became the sort of image of Paris. Right. As Paris was hosting these world fairs, it became very common for articles to be written comparing the Parisienne versus women of other nationalities. And so she becomes really linked to the image of Paris itself and in.
- [62:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Many ways still is. Right. That idea of Parisian chic is something we still very much have. Have. As we've been going through this conversation, I think I've mentioned a few times that I found something really surprising and intriguing, particularly in the book. I wonder, was there Anything you came across in the process of researching all of this that really stuck in your mind as being surprising?
- [62:55]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yes, definitely. I'm glad you asked, because as I was writing the final manuscript, I came across this story of a real courtesan, of a real coquette, that was truly fascinating, and it was almost too perfect. It lived up to almost everything that I've been describing in the book. And that's the life of a woman whose name was Sidonie Marguerite Martin. She was widowed after only six years of marriage at the age of 28. And she then, like any young, appealing, sexy widow, quickly remarries, but for reasons that are obscure, that that husband soon abandons her, and that marriage is in, and she soon becomes, it seems, the mistress of at least one elite man. I came across this story because there's a print that shows a very fashionable woman lifting her skirts to display her foot, which was considered in painting, one of the hallmarks also of the courtesan. And that print was interesting to me because it was titled La Cocotte, which was the name of my chapter. I found out that it was based on a painting by an artist that's obscure today, but was popular then, Gabriel Delafoulouze. And the thing about the painting that was interesting as I was researching it, is that he had based it on a photograph. So as I explore in the book, photographers retained the right to sell pictures of pretty women to whoever wanted them. So he bought it out of a photography studio video and based the photograph on it. But then, as I researched more, it turns out he was likely painting it because she'd been brutally murdered, and so was very much part of the popular culture of the time because they, the society, became fascinated by this murder story. She had been murdered in the forest of Fontainebleau, and there was a sensational trial that captivated Paris and revealed a lot of details about her life. So it's a really a great moment for learning about what a real courtesan or cocotte, what their life would be like. The trial is really fascinating for a lot of reasons, one of which is that she was murdered by her friend and lover, Mathilde Frigard. And so there's a lot of interest because, of course, this is a lesbian relationship, but also because Frigard came from what the press always calls a very good family, and so stays what they thought was remarkably calm throughout the trial. In addition, though, to, you know, her being a murderer and a lesbian, she was also a hypnotist and a spiritualist. So she had this very Unusual reputation. She paints a very dark picture of Martin and implies she had 40 lovers. Obviously trying to disparage the character of the woman that she might murdered. But the trial has 62 witnesses and they actually defend Martin's reputation and insist that she didn't have, you know, nearly that many lovers. And in fact, her principal lover actually testifies under his own name. His name was Paul Lesserre. And he testifies that he truly loved Mertens. And so there's this really, the willingness of this man to testify in her murder trial was really fascinating to me. Her maid says, reveals that she owned four dozen chemises and, you know, dressed very fashionably. In fact, the prosecutor has to explain that the outfit she was killed in was, you know, extremely fashionable. And in fact, it had such a new fashion trend that he explains the fashion trend to the jury. The autopsy report in classic French 19th century fashion says things that we would never see, say in an autopsy report today. But it, it praised the beautiful woman with her young, rounded, graceful, impeccable body. Right. Just goes on and on. And the trial itself involved distributing photos of ns to the jury to sort of testify to her beauty. But then it even takes a more dramatic turn because the prosecutors enter her photo album. So collecting photographs of one's friends was very common in this period. They were called carte de village visites. So she had a photograph album of, of a bunch of elite men. So they enter that album into evidence and read off the names of these men. And there's a huge outcry. We get number of editorials then published by some of these men protesting that their wives shouldn't be discovering their husband's names in the newspaper in this sort of context. And that of course, you know, who hasn't left some revealing trace of their passage through the house of On. But the prosecutor themselves really actually defends the character of Marque Tans. So a lot of the sort of assumptions that might be somewhat different than our own or expectations were sort of perfectly fulfilled in the trial. Freegard ends up being sentenced to hard labor in prison, which, you know, in a sort of ironic twist actually involves sewing. The hard labor they employed women in prisons to do embroidery, to do hand sewing, to do millinery, to make hats. But the other thing that I love about this is that Freegard was so disgusted by how inept the investigators were that after the trial she actually just confesses because she wants to reveal the method of murder which had been incorrectly identified by the investigators. She reveals that she in fact poisoned Martin and even Though they couldn't figure it out. So it really was a sort of perfect encapsulation of how women could move through different types. Right. But also how those types played out in very real life. Right. And it actually was a huge boon to De la Foul career. He then goes and paints a series of more types. He paints Femme comme il fleaut, which is a society woman, and then he paints a Parisienne the next year. So you can see how artists were incentivized to sort of play into these types because they were such a fascination.
- [69:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it brings together so many of the things that we've been discussing. So a fascinating example to tell us about and I think also a good place to end our discussion about the book. Leaving me just with the final question of what you might be working on now that it's done. If there's anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [69:54]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
Yeah, definitely. So I discovered this artist. Her name is Louisa Bema. She was extremely successful painter, a woman artist in the Belle epoch. She's largely unknown today except for being a lover of Sarah Vernhardt. But at the time she was extremely famous. She got the Legion of Honor, which is a decoration that was rarely given to women artists. And I discovered her because there's two paintings by her in the. In the book she painted the figure of the Amazon, a famous actress standing on the steps of Sarah Bernhardt's house dressed as an Amazon. But that discovery led me to look at more of her works and to discover again, looking back at the criticism that her reputation then was very different than it is today. She gets labeled the Queen of the Impressionists alongside side artists like Barrett Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Ava Gonzalez. But she is virtually never mentioned in impressionist contexts by art historians today. So I'm writing a book about her and sort of looking at how in this case a queer artist, she was famously a lover of Sarah Bernhardt, but also a somewhat bold lesbian in her own self fashioning dressing according to the sort of state of stereotypes of lesbian women in this period. So I'm going to be looking at her career, which was very long. She exhibited at more than 50 different salons. So it really gives you a sense of how long her career was and how successful she was.
- [71:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Wow, that definitely sounds like an interesting project. Best of luck.
- [71:36]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
Thank you.
- [71:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Anyone looking to learn more about your work that we've just been talking about can of course read the book the Art of Parisian Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Justine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [71:53]
Dr. Justine DeYoung
Thank you so much for having me.