Trash in fashion: Stylising rags and refuse in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French culture

Abstract

This article discusses the complex and problematic processes involved in the aesthetic representation of the urban street dweller from nineteenth-century Paris to today’s post-modern images on the internet. By analysing the figure of the chiffonnier, the turn-of-the-century fille de joie, and contemporary images that link high fashion with pauperism, we see the social mechanisms discerned by Bourdieu that maintain the disequilibrium in power relationships across classes and thereby reinforce the social status quo. In the nineteenth century this is apparent in prose (novels, critiques, feuilletons and the press) as well as theatre, and in the emphasis on visual spectacle and media at the fin de siècle and in the proliferation of high-contrast images in contemporary advertising, news and social media. Despite the span of almost two centuries, similar practices in the deployment of symbolic power reify social hierarchies.