In Olden Days a Glimpse of Stocking: Fashion,Fetishism and Modernity in Boris Vian’s L’Écume Des Jours

This article analyses an instance of leg fetishism in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947). The aim is to show how the protagonist’s fixation on a pair of nylon stockings can be read as a negotiation of the problems of modernity: the ambivalence that the French feel towards the Americanisation of their culture in the postwar years is shown to be located at the heart of this fetish. Fetishism will then be located within recent theories of the ‘everyday’. Once the modernity of the text has been established, it will be analysed comparatively as a cultural icon: models for the novel’s content will be sought in postwar issues of the fashion magazine Elle. This, in turn, will lead into a discussion of a ‘fashion reading’ of L’Écume des jours, incorporating Georg Simmel’s essay of 1904.