Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in 19th-Century France

＂In this highly original book, Susan Hiner looks behind fashion’s seams and focuses on the women fashion producers - both working- and middle-class -- who were key to shaping the French fashion economy. Behind the seams thus opens up the fields of both fashion and French cultural studies and explores new ways of understanding the 19th centry by demonstrating that these women’s complex and contradictory roles as producers of luxury items left them exploited by an oppressive fashion system even as they served as influencers within it.＂-- Supplied by publisher.

Susan Hiner is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College working at the intersection of literature, visual culture, and cultural history of women. She is the author of Accessories to Modernity (2010) and numerous articles pertaining to nineteenth-century French culture. She was awarded an NEH grant for 2016-17 to advance her new book Behind the Seams.