The emergence of French Vogue: French identity and visual culture in the fashion press, 1920–40

Abstract

This article, located at the crossroads where press culture meets corporate history, analyses the functional collaboration of two magazines within the same publishing house – American Vogue (1892) and French Vogue (1920) – through the analysis of unpublished private archives. It explores for the first time, through the case of fashion illustration, the scope and nature of their agreements and divergences in order to understand the way that French Vogue won the freedom to pursue its own format and editorial objectives during the 1930s. The combined history of these two editions is also part of a second narrative, whose elements are stylistic and aesthetic – that is, the evolution from Pictorialism to modernism – and technical – that is, the transition from drawing to photography, as part of the internationalization of press practices. By focusing on the conflict between American and French Vogues in their approach to fashion illustration, this article illuminates those competing visions. The editors of American Vogue incorporated illustrations into their broadly commercial conceptualization of the fashion magazine. On the contrary, the editors of French Vogue saw their illustrations principally as art, as a reflection of the creativity of the couturiers.

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