Abstract
Fashion is both an integral component to the flâneur’s representation of self and symbolic of the modernity that the stroller observes and chronicles in depictions of the city. This essay examines the ways in which Guy de Maupassant, in his 1885 novel Bel-Ami, uses fashion to divide the figure of the flâneur across lines of gender into three of the text’s principal characters: Georges Duroy, Clotilde de Marelle, and Madeleine Forestier. This approach reveals that Maupassant understands both fashion and flânerie as multisensorial practices that engage the city through the senses of smell, touch, and hearing. Paradoxically, rather than contributing solely to the notion of a fractured, fragmented urban subject, Maupassant’s separation of the flâneur can also be read to suggest the opposite: the possibility of shared subjectivity in Third Republic modernity.
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