When Fashion Stood Still: from la mode assiégée to la mode durable

This article analyzes the “political” columns, composed during the siege and Commune of Paris, of Emmeline Raymond, editor-in-chief of La Mode illustrée. Not surprisingly, the author of the most bourgeois of fashion journals bears witness to history by critiquing first the invading Germans and then the enemy from within, the Communards. But her columns also reveal an unwitting sympathy with certain principles animating the Commune's social and political unrest, ultimately proposing fashion reforms that explicitly critique Second Empire excess and target the fashion system itself.