Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (review)

Abstract

Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism. By Mary E. Davis. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 6.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xix, 336 p.ISBN-10: 0- 5202-4542-3; ISBN 13: 978-0-520- 24542-6. $39.95.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Mary E. Davis's dissertation examined Erik Satie's esprit gaulois, and her first book required a decade of perusing lavishly illustrated magazines at height of their haute couture alliance with music. Her suggestion in this journal last year to consider that something fun may have been going on here (review of The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940, by Jane Fulcher, in Notes 63, no. 2 [December 2006]: 358-62) comes from a true expert in French musical gaiete. Musicians-Clothing-20th century is library catalog subject heading for Classic Chic, though what readers learn is not very much about musicians' clothing, but about how audiences for concerts and ballets in France before and soon after World War I were encouraged to dress. Davis contends that in early days of French modernism (ending in 1925), was art equal to music and painting, and she shows how its creators worked hand in glove, so to speak, with composers and painters (and its promoters with theatrical impresarios) to produce, for well off, encompassing style of universal participation. Nancy J. Troy's Couture Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) linked with modern art, and Davis builds upon similar work from a variety of scholars of early modernist musical and material culture, meticulously annotating her numerous sources. Her singular exploration of nexus of and music reminds me of a book she does not mention: Bonnie Wade's Imaging Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which also studied national costumes and music. Wade looks for mutual influences of Mughal and Hindu musical cultures over several centuries of South Indian history, drawing some conclusions by noticing changes in dress. Davis focuses on cultural force of modernism as expressed in French music and in first decades of twentieth century. Both scholars use illustrative art to make their points. Mughal rulers supported workshops where artists turned out officially sanctioned depictions of court events and common social activities; French and American magazine publishers of period Davis studies commissioned highly trained artists to draw or photograph trendsetting styles that would sell. Both cultural propaganda endeavors pictured ideal, stylized worlds, larger-thanlife even in miniature. What raises these images to status of art is their continued ability to communicate the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time and place, as Davis tells us Baudelaire wrote of illustration (p. 9). From them we may draw conclusions about their underlying reality, not least of which is that sartorial beauty and music were important to both societies, not only on formal occasions, but also in daily life. Consistently documenting musical events that were instigated by or important to them, Classic Chic centers a chapter each on designers Paul Poiret, Germaine Bongard, and Coco Chanel, and magazines La gazette du bon ton, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. An introductory chapter traces link between and music (both necessary for elegant living) to French publications of seventeenth century, when fashion plates first appeared. Early French periodicals published piano pieces but by end of nineteenth century, commentary on public concerts replaced sheet music, for music now was an art ripe for consumption rather than practice (p. 13). Poiret established himself as a designer of neo-classical styles and host of musical soirees where old music was played on early instruments. Davis notes that he created a taste for such historical authenticity in music a decade before Nadia Boulanger's similar salons began. …