Abstract
This article discusses three paintings by Paul Signac which represent, it is argued, uncomfortably and with a critical edge informed by the artist's anarchist politics, the production of fashionable commodities by working‐class Parisian women, and the fetishizing of those commodities by the (sub)urban middle class. Finisher and Trimmer (Fashion), rue du Caire (also called Milliners) (1885–86) pictures two milliners whose bodies at work acknowledge the pressures placed upon them by the factories and department stores with which they were forced to compete. Dining Room (1886–87) and A Parisian Sunday (1888–90) picture well‐to‐do Parisians at home, surrounded by stylish commodities that compete for attention with their bored or estranged owners. All three paintings recall the ideas of the anarchist writer Pierre Kropotkin, in particular his objection to ‘the spending of useless toil on objects … to satisfy the dull vanity of the rich’.
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