Clothing-wise, I’ve never really been fashionable. First of all, dressing trendy ends up being expensive, and I’m not rich like Croesus, so no. Then, and above all, I hate shopping. I am therefore content, for the sake of appearance, to be more or less of my time – I would not like to attract attention with ostensibly out-of-date outfits – but I only provide, in this matter, the minimum service, i.e., basically, jeans and t-shirt.
I find fashion insignificant. Coco Chanel defined her by saying that she was what goes out of fashion. The French sociologist Guillaume Erner improved this definition by writing, in The dictionary of social science (PUF, 2006), that fashion is what goes out of fashion without good reason. That says a lot about the lightness of the thing.
Even more, fashion annoys me. I come from a working-class village background before the Internet in which the injunction to be in the latest fashion did not have the influence it has in trendy circles. Despite this, I have too often seen young people being ridiculed, even ostracized, because their style, quite unintentionally, did not correspond to current tastes.
In his Philosophical dictionary (PUF, 2013), André Comte-Sponville rightly cites Edgar Morin who states that “fashion is what allows the elite to differentiate themselves from the common, hence its perpetual movement, [mais aussi] which allows the common people to resemble the elite, hence its incessant diffusion.”
Fashion, obviously, is a matter of social classes, and it is not the poor who dictate the game. It is, for this reason, another of the cruel manifestations of socio-economic injustice.
I don’t like fashion, therefore, but I am forced to note that it imposes itself on everyone, and in a particularly violent way on the lower classes, who see clearly that not following it exposes them to relegation. social.
The art historian Esther Trépanier illustrates the phenomenon in an unexpected way in The fashion will she save Cinderella? (PUM, 2023, 136 pages), a brilliant little essay which offers a very original rereading of three Quebec novels: Second-hand happiness (1945), by Gabrielle Roy, In the middle, the mountain (1951), by Roger Viau, and Elise Velder (1958), by Robert Choquette. I especially remember those of Roy and Viau.
The two novels take place during the Great Depression resulting from the crisis of 1929 and have as their main character a poor young girl, determined to get out of it, in particular by engaging in the game of seduction to find a good match. “Who, from appearance or class determinism, will triumph on the marriage market? » asks Trépanier, before launching into a very detailed reading of the two works from the angle of the social issues linked to the fashion phenomenon.
The latter may be essentially insignificant, but it is not socially insignificant. Trépanier surprises by noting that Second-hand happiness is full of descriptions of the characters’ clothing and appearance. When going to the hospital to give birth, Rose-Anna, the mother, a milliner by trade forced by the crisis to do sewing at home, hesitates to leave because she is ashamed of “her poor clothes “.
His daughter, Florentine, adorns herself with jewelry, dresses and makeup to create an illusion, to seduce the poor but ambitious Jean Lévesque, always well dressed to at least display the “signs of success” while waiting to obtain this last in reality.
The young girl’s “made-up poverty”, however, does not seduce the ambitious man, who flees her. When Florentine invites Jean into the pitiful family home, the young man is overwhelmed by the poverty that reigns there, “and it is in a way this poverty that he attacks by attacking Florentine’s body,” Trépanier judiciously notes.
Florentine will get out of it by seducing Emmanuel Létourneau, a middle-class man from Saint-Henri. She believes she achieves this thanks to her finery, but Roy specifies instead that the seduction operates because the young man falls under the spell of the popular vitality that Florentine embodies. It is out of pity that he loves this poor girl whom fashion cannot transform into a princess, Trépanier concludes.
Jacqueline Malo, the heroine ofAt middle, mountaina wonderful novel unfortunately forgotten, is more resourceful and more realistic than Florentine, but it will suffer a similar fate by being broken by class contempt.
However, I would have loved her, this daring girl with her little fluffy collar who makes the animal friends of her rich lover laugh. I find the revolt of those who are crushed more beautiful than the distinction of those who are satisfied.
That must be why I chose literature over fashion.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.