Breasts are back! Colette's critique of flapper fashion

Abstract

This paper focuses on Colette's writing for the periodical press, particularly her writing on fashion, and sets out to discuss it in terms of its capacity to effect the high purposes of satire. Its method of reading is contextualizing, rather than immanent - it brings it into relation with a number of issues on which it bears: the history of fashion, the history of the body, generational change, the visual determinants of the fashions of the early twentieth century. Although humour is prominent, Colette is not content merely to make jokes. Ancient satire, which derives from the rhetoric of praise and blame, is the source of literary and art criticism, and Colette borrows both its modes and i..