Agnès Rocamora: THE WOMAN IN THE CROWD: La Passante, Fashion and Urban Space
London College of Fashion, University of the Arts
Images of women walking in city streets constitute a significant mode of representation of fashionable female city-dwellers, with the street an ideal stage for the display of fashionable styles, for looking and being looked at. However, whilst much attention has been paid in academia to the subject of the gaze in this urban game of fashion - the flâneur -, its object - lapassante [the female passer-by] - has been largely ignored. La passante is the other side of modernity, its feminine face, whose visibility in the work of many writers and artists contrasts with its absence in that of cultural analysts. In this paper, I compare the concepts of the flâneur and the flâneuse with those of the passant and passante. I look at the appropriation of the figure of la passante in the contemporary fashion media, discussing its relevance to fashion discourse and the representation of fashion, women and the metropolis.
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Dr. Agnès Rocamora is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London. She has published journal articles on the field of fashion and is a contributor to Fashion’s World Cities (ed. by C. Breward and D. Gilbert, Berg) and Fashion as Photograph (ed. By E. Shinkle, IB Tauris, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book entitled Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (IB Tauris).