At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity.

Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the -new silhouette, - Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern...