Creating City Chic. The Parisian Influence on Interwar Bucharest Fashion Preprint PDF

This paper examines the influence of urban fashion ideas disseminated worldwide from France and how they impacted the Romanian ideas of style and beauty, as well as the nature of the communication between Paris and the so-colled ”Little Paris”. My aim is to decode the interwar Romanian interpretation of the new woman notion and assess what type of role contemporary French gender philosophies had played in its creation. For this, I will investigate the nature of this inter-capital dialogue in order to determine the intersections and contrasts, which I will integrate within the larger cultural, social, economic and political context in Romania, France, and worldwide. I will treat women’s fashion as the materialization of multiple factors pertaining to interwar Bucharest’s private and public life habits, as a capital embracing both modernity and tradition with an original tone. My sources include relevant local, national and international publications, including periodicals, contemporary books, guides and memoirs. These will also provide a clearer scope of the Parisian influence through articles and fashion spreads, but also through the multitude of ads published throughout interwar Romania. Furthermore, I will underline the theoretical and aesthetic influence Romanians had on Parisian fashion from two points of view. The first will be the case of women used by artists or public and private entities as models or passive agents in fashion creation and dissemination. I will use the Miss Romania pageants as a general example, alongside the more complex story of dancer Lizica Codreanu and her connection to Constantin Brâncuși and Tristan Tzara, and through him to Sonia Delaunay. For the second category I will use the example of Alice Cocea and Elvire Popesco as movie fashion icons, and of Princess Marthe Bibesco as both a style influencer and fashion theoretician