ABSTRACT
This chapter examines photographic and textual descriptions of the flâneuse in Vogue Paris from the 1930s to the 1950s. Recognizing the importance of sartorial description as a rich source of cultural information—something highlighted by Charles Baudelaire’s analysis of eighteenth-century fashion plates in “The Painter of Modern Life” and more recently by Rachel Mesch and Ilya Parkins’s examination of gender and femininity in twentieth-century fashion magazines—this chapter highlights the intersection of flânerie studies and fashion media scholarship. Focusing specifically on representations of women walking in the French edition of Vogue by designers (Jacques Heim, Legroux Soeurs, Molyneux, Charles Montaigne, Elsa Schiaparelli) and photographers (Robert Doisneau, Don Honeyman, Agneta Fischer, Robert Randall, Roger Schall), this chapter demonstrates how innovations in fashion photography and design in the decades just before and after Second World War, including the outdoor photo shoot, an emphasis on movement, the increasingly active participation of the model, and the evolving photographic gesture, worked to reposition the French flâneuse as a subject with agency. This photographic series of walking in France also demonstrates how female flânerie is constantly evolving, on the move, and exposing new urban territories, real and imagined.
