Abstract
In the Second Empire, the burgeoning fashion press increasingly promoted a codified beauty and a plethora of ritualized codes of dressing and activity. The discourse of these magazines was also the site for an ever more insistent and invasive publicity for products to correct the reader’s imperfect appearance. This article examines the editorial discourse on fashionable female appearance in the Second Empire and argues that the discourse of the fashion magazines not only co-opts women into consumption, but is also designed to alienate the woman from her body and limit the narcissistic pleasure of dress. The analysis focuses, in particular, on the editorial of the popular magazine Le Moniteur de la mode that promoted the fashionable figure of ‘la Parisienne’. It also refers to the novels of Ernest Feydeau (La Comtesse de Chalis), Flaubert (L’Éducation sentimentale), the Goncourts (Renée Mauperin and Manette Salomon), and Arsène Houssaye (Les Parisiennes).
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