Phenix on Hiner (2023)

For those unfamiliar with clothing construction, cutting fabric on the bias means cutting across the grain of a material at a forty-five-degree angle to the selvedge edge. Doing so reduces the tension of the weave and gives the fabric a soft elasticity that renders it more fluid, flattering, and form fitting because of the way it hangs on the body. Susan Hiner’s beautiful new book, Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in 19th-Century France, exploits the poly-seam-ic possibilities of this technique to describe the fraught tensions between the bourgeois ideal of femininity and the reality of working women’s lives. To reconcile these conflicts, Hiner argues, female fashion producers in nineteenth-century France had to “cut ‘along’ the bias” of contemporary attitudes about women and work to reclaim their own representation and to create legitimate professional pathways in the industry for themselves (202). These women engaged with discourses of femininity—at times promoting them, at others protesting them—to claim creative freedom, to disseminate their art, and, in many cases, to support their families.

Metaphorically speaking, Hiner’s methodology has much in common with the bias cut: she approaches her vast archival material from a novel angle by centering the voices and experiences of female fashion workers. This focus traces the contours of their lives in a way that is truer to form than the reductive stereotypes that circulated at the time about women working in the needle trades. Hiner articulates the contradictions at the heart of her project in terms of the book’s two major theoretical conceits—the seam and the veil, both of which operate according to the logic of the commodity fetish. The seam is both the locus of women’s work and the sartorial index of women’s virtue: the term “seamy” equates disreputable morals with visible seams. As the site of juncture and disjuncture, the seam is the place where “specifically female work” both reveals and attempts to conceal itself (2). Hiner identifies an analogous tension between the hypervisibility of fashionable commodities and the invisibility of the women who produced them—an erasure accomplished through the capitalist mechanisms of “mythologizing, anonymity, and marginalization” (2). These paternalistic biases precluded the possibility of work outside the home for bourgeois “domestic goddesses” and reduced working-class women to “eroticized strumpets” (14). Those who gained an economic foothold in the fashion industry succeeded because they concealed their labor behind the ideological veils of leisure or sexual availability (depending on their social class) in a hostile marketplace that “either diminished the acknowledgment of women’s work or erased it altogether” (13).

The chapters of Hiner’s book are organized according to the different professions that women practiced in the fashion industry. In “Fashion’s Fingers: Immodest Modistes,” Hiner addresses the myth of the lascivious, striving milliner who flirts to convert male desire into social and financial capital. This chapter surveys a variety of documents—including fashion illustrations, boulevard plays, and bankruptcy records—to push back against monolithic depictions of modistes that portrayed them as simply coquettish rather than highly skilled and hard working. Hiner profiles three prolific fashion journalists in “Fashion’s Voices: Modistes des lettres”: Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy (known also as J.J.), who wrote during the July Monarchy; the vicomtesse de Renneville, whose career spanned the Second Empire; and Madame Emmeline Raymond, who chronicled fads in the Third Republic. In their respective columns, each of these proto-influencers advanced contemporary feminine ideals in ways that belied their own circumstances: J.J. was divorced and childless; Renneville was a single parent separated from her husband; and Raymond, the standard bearer of bourgeois family values, lived her life as a spinster—a term that is doubly suggestive considering the word’s historical association with textiles. In “Fashion’s Eyes: Painting in the Mirror,” Hiner turns her attention to the Colin sisters, Héloïse Leloir and Anaïs Toudouze. Shut out of the École des beaux arts because they were women, the sisters channeled their skills into fashion plate illustration and, by signing their works, earned more success and recognition than any of the male artists in their family.

Hiner deftly negotiates between the global and the granular, at once tracing discursive trends in fashion publications over decades and performing close readings of individual artifacts. For example, Hiner ingeniously demonstrates how an insect depicted in an 1865 fashion plate both foregrounds the fashion commodity (the Chapron handkerchief the mother uses to shoo the bug away) and connects the sisters to contemporary male artist J.J. Grandville, who depicted men as bugs and women as flowers in Les Fleurs animées (1847), and to the Impressionist painters, who contended with insects while working en plein air. As for the book’s own visual quality, Behind the Seams is gorgeously illustrated; it has the graphic appeal of a coffee table book and the scholarly heft of a sustained academic study. Hiner’s wit shines through her clear, elegant prose and makes the book an enjoyable and edifying read for anyone interested in the material culture, popular press, economic history, or gender politics of nineteenth-century France.

To finish on the bias: on the last page of Behind the Seams, Hiner evokes pathbreaking couturière Madeleine Vionnet, whose bias-cut free-flowing dresses granted freedom of movement for the wearer. But even more consequential than the symbolic importance of Vionnet’s designs are her pioneering initiatives to improve workplace conditions for her employees, such as providing them on-site health care, paid holidays, and maternity leave—resources that were far the beyond the reach of their nineteenth-century sister seamstresses. Despite Vionnet’s noble efforts, the same contradictions surrounding women and work that Hiner identifies in the nineteenth century persist in the twenty-first. She points to Dana Thomas’s observation that, because of their abysmally low wages, many women in the global textile industry are forced into sex work to supplement their meager incomes. Once again, fashion finds itself at the confluence of the needle trades and the flesh trade. Plus ça change, Hiner reminds the reader.

Behind the Seams ultimately invites us to consider the ethics of our own fashion system. What is being veiled, for example, when fast fashion behemoth and mega-polluter Temu pushes “Save the Earth” tote bags to its consumers? Do we recognize the seaminess of corporate practices that market feminist t-shirts to the masses while essentially forcing their female employees into prostitution? Though the principle focus of Hiner’s book is nineteenth century, it also provides us a model of how to think about our own fashion consumption. As Hiner suggests in her title, we just have to be willing to look behind the seams.