Aileen Ribeiro: "Renoir and the Democracy of Fashion"
March 28, 2012
Alex Gordon Lecture in the History of Art: "Renoir and the Democracy of Fashion," by Aileen Ribeiro, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, March 28, 2012. The period after the fall of the Second Empire in France saw huge developments in the fashion industry, not just in haute couture, but also in the greater availability of ready-to-wear clothes and in the emergence of Paris's shopping culture. More people than ever before expressed an interest in fashion trends, a phenomenon that was reflected in contemporary art and literature. This lecture explores some of the ways in which Renoir depicted fashion and fabrics in his paintings of the 1870s and 1880s.