Assessing The Paris Fashionable Concepts Cultural Studies Essay

Assessing The Paris Fashionable Concepts Cultural Studies Essay The concept of ‘Paris fashion’ represents one of the most powerful and long-running place in modern history. But even a cursory examination of the way the term has been used draws attention to the complexity of the notion of the fashion capital, and to the complexity of the fashion process itself. The routine description of the city over the past 200 years as the capital world of fashion contribute to this understanding. ::::Downloads:eiffel-tower-1.jpg Figure 2.2 , Eifel Tower in Paris, Available at: http://www.eiffel-tower.us/Eiffel-Tower-Images/eiffel-tower-1.jpg Paris is the ‘Fashion Capital of the World’. Paris has long been an international hub of fashion design. Paris is home to many distinguished design houses, such as Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Chloe, Givenchy, Lanvin, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton. Paris is also a premier destination for shopping, with streets such as Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honre and the Champs-Elysees hosting boutiques from des igners around the world. Besides fashion and leather goods, Paris is has a number of well-known jewelers, such as Cartier SA, Boucheron, Chaumet, and Van Cleef Dutch design duo Viktor and Japanese deisgners Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and Junya Watanabe. Pinault-Printemps-Redoute and LVMH, the two major holding companies in contemporary fashion, are both headquartered in Paris. Paris has been interpreted as a world centre of fashion because of its distinctive metropolitan cultures of consumption, both in the narrow sense of shops and shopping, and in a broader sense of the practices associated with the wearing of fashionable dress in the spaces of the city. There has been something approaching a naturalization of Paris’s relationship with fashion, often around the elevation of a certain construction of fashionable femininity to a symbol of Parisian superiority. [Fashion’s World Cities, David Gilbert, 2006] ::::Downloads:christian_dior_haute_couture_2009_01.jpg Figur e 2.3 , Christian Dior Haute Couture fashion show 2009, Available at: http://iamfashioncrazy.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/christian_dior_haute_couture_2009_01.jpg Since the seventeenth century, fashion has been an important industry and cultural export of France, and modern â€Å"haute couture† originated in Paris in the 1860s. Today, Paris is considered one of the world’s fashion capitals, along with London, Milan, and New York City, and the city is home or headquarters to many of the premier fashion houses. The culture of Paris and of the French people has been shaped by geography, by profound historical events, and by foreign and internal forces and groups. Paris, has played an important part as a center of high culture and of decorative arts since the seventeenth century, first in Europe, and from the nineteenth century onwards, world wide. From the late nineteenth century, Paris has also played an important role in modern art, cinema, fashion and cuisine.