If, as scholars have shown, Paris was a ‘woman’s city’, then Parisian fashions for men, and men’s attention to elegance, style and modern design was, as we might conclude, non-existent or trivialised at best. The modern metropolis, fashion and gender became so inextricably linked that by the time of the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris, it was concluded in the twelve-volume encyclopaedia, that: ‘Whereas men go to London for suits and shirts, women all dream of being dressed in Paris’. These grand claims, while true in some measure, have obscured the relationship French tailors and their clients have had in the economic and cultural life of the country. If men went to London for the tailored goods and bespoke accessories of sartorial gentlemanliness, the assumption is that men’s fashions were removed from everyday life of Paris as much as from the national concerns of post-war reconstruction and the balance of payment. This paper will explore the critical transnational path that men’s wear took beginning with the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes and then the 1928 Exposition de France a Athènes to become an important marker of national wellbeing and a formidable force within the sartorial landscape.

Bio 

Dr John Potvin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. His research generally focuses on the ways the male body, competing masculinities and dissident sexualities are performed, represented, memorialised and perceived through various modern design and visual cultures since the late 19th century. The author of over 40 essays, his work has been published in such leading journals as The Journal of Design History, Journal of Interior Design, Senses and Society, Genders, Home Cultures, Visual Culture in Britain and Fashion Theory. Recent book publications include Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013) and Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014), winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize. Dr Potvin serves on the editorial and advisory boards of several international peer-reviewed journals and was book review editor for Interiors: Interiors, Design and Architecture (2011-13). His current book project, Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris explores the fashion, painting, performance and design cultures of the much-neglected interwar dandy and in spring 2016 he was awarded a four-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant to explore ‘Sexuality, Masculinity and Shame in Interior Design: From Professionalization to Queer Theory, 1869-2015’. Contact: john.potvin@concordia.ca.