Domesticating enchantment: Mediating feminine magic in the interwar French fashion magazine

The character of modern feminine enchantment

What, precisely, characterised narratives about feminine enchantment as a by-product of modern consumer society? Several themes emerge from a close analysis of the articles. The first is the tendency to locate enchantment in fashionable garments and their relationship to the feminine wearer. Consider again Bernstein’s article about long dresses. Notable here is that though he has identified enchanting mystery as a naturally occurring quality of women, Bernstein is of course writing about clothing. In this sense, Bernstein’s piece is perfectly typical of these frequent opinion pieces about femininity, which often collapse women and fashionable garment, so that the garment metonymically stands in for femininity as a broad construct. The long dress, he suggests, is an indispensable aid in the maintenance of this air of mystery. Women ‘s’enveloppent en gazes’, recognising that poets ‘rêvent des profondeurs de l’Océan parce qu’elles sont impénétrables’, and the addition of a flowing skirt accentuates this dynamic (1930: 53). Bernstein describes a provisional hybridisation of body and garment, in which the garment is described in what might best be described as naturalistic terms, calling on terms like ‘rythme’, ‘chair’, and ‘matière’ to emphasise the mystery of women. Such terms are echoed across the genre, such as in a 1937 piece about autumn in Paris, in which ‘Des toilettes tièdes et secrètes poussent aux corps des jolies femmes’ (Fargue, 1937: 69). The source of women’s mystery – in their own biology and history, or in their changing clothing – becomes ambiguous.

A piece from La Femme Chic à Paris in April 1930 both relies on this naturalistic association and exemplifies the nostalgic desires that characterise the genre. This article, about the way that women flourish in the springtime, laments men’s loss of an ancient sense of wonder that was no doubt enjoyed by their ancestors. Women, though, Robert Dieudonné suggests, are still in possession of this mysterious orientation to the marvellous, and display it on their bodies through their changing clothes. Dieudonné describes women’s vernal flourishing with a kind of wistfulness: ‘Pauvre de nous, les hommes! qui n’avons pas garde les sens merveilleux qui possédaient sans doute de lointains ancêtres et qui leur faisaient accueillir les saisons comme une ivresse ou comme une catastrophe’ (1930: 23). Contact with women, here, brings onto the horizon an alternative mode of being for men themselves. Enchanting femininity becomes a technology of unknowability that recalls them to imagined premodern capacities for wonder and terror, which have, it is implied, been lost in the restrictive ‘habits of civilisation’ that conspire to keep women from escaping with the change of seasons. Women not only body forth this quality of enchantment, but they transfer it, through visual contact, to men.

The sense that enchantment might do something, or give something, to men, runs through this genre of article. A 1921 piece by Marcel Astruc in the Gazette du Bon Ton, for instance, describes a reverie that takes place when the author falls asleep among a group of fashionable women who are talking about clothing. Their discussion of their clothes provokes an experience of enchantment. Here, the essential unknowability of women themselves once again bleeds into their clothing – or vice versa, perhaps – and Astruc describes a dream state in which the women’s clothing is animate and their bodies are lifeless: ‘Je remarquai avec plaisir qu’elles étaient toutes fort belles et faites le plus agréablement du monde, avec, toutefois, dans le regard, quelque chose de vague et d’absent qui m’étonna’ (1921: 94). Here, enchanting women are effectively neutralised, their enchanting qualities displaced onto their clothing. They inaugurate no relation with Astruc, as he is dreaming and they are inanimate – this is not an encounter with otherness, but with absence. Yet he is still able to partake of their enchanting qualities, as these are transferred onto the safer medium of their clothing. And partake he does, setting the scene in full detail and revelling in its odd beauty. The scene describes an aesthetic enrichment that nourishes and rejuvenates Astruc. It is staged via the voices of enchanting women, but comes without the usually attendant encounter with alterity; the question of whether these women need surveillance is effectively circumvented by describing them as inanimate.

Astruc’s article describes a clear harnessing of the affective power of enchantment in the service of something else – in this case, aesthetic enrichment. In this sense, it is of a piece with the secular magic explored by Simon During (2002) as a feature of industrial modernity. During identifies a number of affinities between the properties of secular magic and the spiritual project of the Romantics, which he calls an ‘appeal to a supra-mundane but not wholly religious power directed against a fallen social-political order, in the service of an individual’s “creativity”’ (2002: 23). The enchantment called upon by the Romantics, as During points out, has a ‘private use-value’. That is, ‘the Romantics were more interested in what cosmic energies could achieve for them personally – how they could be harnessed for creativity – than in their own relation or contribution to any grand project ascribed to cosmic energies’ (2002: 24). During notes that in the Romantic period, older occultist models began to take on a distinctly ‘literary/artistic’ cast. This genre of masculine parsing of feminine enchantment flows directly from this Romantic heritage, and the concept of Romanticism’s ‘secular magic’ begins to answer the vexing question about the preponderance of this genre of very explicitly masculine writing about femininity and fashion; such invocations of mystery contribute to the labour of masculine self-realisation among aesthetically inclined cultural commentators.

This direct use of enchantment in self-realisation works together with the constant watchfulness of periodical prose to intervene in the potential of the alterity that is gestured at in mediations of enchantment. It is true that enchantment describes an encounter with the unfamiliar that has the potential to move people, to transform them. In that sense, it has uses, of a sort. Its uses, though, are anarchic, unclassifiable, reflecting the enchanting object’s location outside the economy of legibility and being absorbed by the viewer in ways that are not replicable or masterable. But in proposing to revel in the unknowable energy and describing its direct application in self-realisation, the authors not only place it under watch, but abstract it. These negotiations of enchantment, while they rely on an encounter with the unfamiliar, ossify that unfamiliarity by putting it into direct service of human development, negating its inexplicable and unpredictable quality. The Romantic model of enchantment’s use-value, when attached to a feminine figure such as the ones navigated in these magazines, ultimately feeds into a deep cultural archive of images of women supporting the masculine labour of self-fashioning. In this case, satisfying self-making requires an ambiguous or even hostile attitude to the modern that was embodied by the enchanting creatures being described.

The identities of the male authors who wrote for these titles bear further witness to this complexity. As Margaret Beetham has argued for the British context, the feminine style periodical had a uniquely close relationship to the time of the ‘now’ that characterised modern magazines; the magazines absorbed fashion and style’s rapidly changeable tempo (Beetham, 2015). And so we might imagine that these periodicals were venues for the conscious promotion and embrace of experiment and vanguardism – in a capacious understanding of modernism that is not limited to artistic avant-gardes but comprises a variety of cultural formations emergent from industrialisation and the Enlightenment. In truth, though, none of the three magazines consistently embraced aesthetic modernism, and in fact they were punctuated by hostility to modern ‘innovation’ even as they described and documented novelty. The men contributing to the magazines fit this profile: Marcel Astruc, journalist and editor; Henry Bernstein, playwright; Gaston Derys, food and wine writer; Robert Dieudonné, journalist and playwright; Leon-Paul Fargue, poet and essayist; Hervé Lauwick, humourist; Jean Selz, art historian and critic.

As my analysis of their response to enchanting femininity reveals, they were most clearly in the debt of the Romantics as they came into contact with mysterious femininity in its modern guise and indeed with the commercially mediated femininity at the centre of the magazines. For though they were contemporaries of modernists in literature and the visual arts, a close look at the oeuvres of these male writers reveals that they eschewed the experiments with form and sense, the resolute engagement with the new, that famously characterised metropolitan modernisms from World War I to the interwar years. Each of the authors I trace here are prolific, and some very well known and celebrated. All but one published regularly in women’s periodicals, with their typical output very similar to the examples I analyse here. And all were active in a wider literary or artistic scene. Yet an examination of their work reveals no relation to the various avant-gardes that proved so influential in this period and was beginning to mark fashion periodicals (with the exception of Jean Selz, an art historian and critic who was attuned as an observer to developments in the visual arts). In fact, one of them, Léon-Paul Fargue, a very well-regarded poet, classed himself as a Symbolist (that late nineteenth-century category) and was strongly opposed to the experiments of Surrealism. Taken together, this group of authors represents an Establishment literary scene quite untouched by modernism. This social positioning was deeply significant to their implicit theorisation of enchantment.

Enchantment as idea and experience

And how are we to understand the category of enchantment in its own right? As is evident from the thematic analysis above, enchantment has a complex entanglement with the culture of modernity, which provides a backdrop against which to understand its narration and domestication. To counter the disenchantment thesis first elaborated by Max Weber, which suggests that the secularisation of modernity brought with it the loss of the experience of wonder, a range of scholars has documented what Molly McGarry calls ‘the continued refusals of the world to be disenchanted’ (2008: 12). ¹ Michael Saler, in his work on new varieties of modern enchantment, points out that enchantment is not an either/or state; enchanting people and phenomena contain the power both to delight and to beguile (2004: 138). That is, they at once provide experiences of deep pleasure and fascination, and experiences of terror. Enchantment is a profoundly ambiguous state, holding together emotions commonly imagined to be opposed. A close look at men’s mediation of women’s unknowability in interwar French magazines reveals such an ambiguity – along with its connection to the unique atmosphere of industrial modernity, including mechanisation, commercialisation and spectacle.

The treatment of women as the incarnation or vector of magic seems promising from a point of view interested in the potential of interrupting dominant ideological arrangements. A significant body of critical theory has identified enchantment as an important counter-tendency to the ossifying logic of modernity. Ann Burlein and Jackie Orr, in considering its feminist significance, write, ‘The force of enchantment … activates sensual matters in uncertain ways, via rhythm, play, poetic gesture, vibratory frequencies that confuse or re-fuse familiar temporalities, and initiate transformed perception’ (2012: 15). They describe a non-rational epistemology, an experience of disorientation that breaks with modernity’s logics of linearity, clarity and mastery. In this sense, enchantment has much in common with various modernist aesthetic regimes – especially those in the visual arts and music – that also seek to enliven audiences through the registers of shock or disorientation. This description also, of course, aptly describes the tenor of any liberation movement; enchantment seems to share a mood with change-making, world-building and revolution. Many strands of feminism, too, advance a critique of the Enlightenment legacy as the root of logics of domination. The model of the self-governing, rational and masterful subject, after all, has underpinned an ethics of domination, including, as many have argued, legitimating colonisation. If enchantment’s rejection of rationality holds within it the potential to dis- and re-orient people, it does so in part through providing pathways for alternative ethical relations.

In Jane Bennett’s influential book on modern enchantment, she writes that ‘the affective force of … moments [of enchantment] might be deployed to propel ethical generosity’ (2001: 3). And, at its core, Enchantment requires another – whether that other is a person, a natural wonder, or a mechanical marvel – for one is too familiar with oneself to provoke the disorientation that wonder requires. From a critical feminist perspective, enchantment thus seems promising because it underscores the radical unassimilability of various phenomena and people. Rather than enfolding the world in sameness – the trick of modern liberalism – enchantment assumes the existence of radical difference and does not seek to appropriate, colonise, annihilate or even explain it. ² Further, enchantment contains a vision of alterity that turns not only on the existence of another, but on the necessary force of being touched by that other. The other is not rendered invisible, made mute; they communicate via the force of the sensory impression they make. The other is seen, but cannot be surveilled; being incompletely legible, they seem in fact to defy surveillance. Encounter is at the root of the experience of enchantment – and, importantly, it is an encounter through the look: a compelled, but distant, gaze at the wondrous. A response is compelled, and the other, after all, has the capacity to change the self. Ethics of enchantment are thus ethics of encounter – often of visual encounter – and contain in them the capacity to disrupt conceptions of the sovereign, masterful subject.

Enchantment as it is described in the recent critical literature also has competing affective dimensions at the core of its ethics; as I note above, this is not an either/or experience, but one that mobilises a variety of disparate moods. Betty M. Bayer (2013), while her description of enchantment contains positive affect, stresses ambiguity in a way that accords well with Michael Saler’s emphasis on its complexity and internal contradictions. For Bayer, because enchantment is entangled with the dominant cultural narrative of de-enchantment, its ‘expressive orders register as longing, alienation, melancholy, loss and nostalgia, of unbidden desire for “something more”, as worlds passing and others coming into view’ (2012: 29). The co-presence of enchantment and alienation in a constellation of feelings related to nostalgia and loss seems relevant to the consideration of women as mediums of enchantment in the early twentieth century. For women’s prominent role in consumer culture – as spectacles, as consumers, as ‘seller and sold in one’ ³ – allied them at once with its seductive promise and its degrading potential. If enchantment is indeed generative of conflicting feelings – joy and fear, seduction and terror – then it maps beautifully on to the complex ways that femininity signified in early twentieth-century consumer culture.

Significant here are the emotions and phenomenal states generated by enchantment’s links to vision. The transfer of enchantment through visual contact is particularly important. Although such pieces implicitly evoke other senses through their references to clothing and fashion – most notably, touch – they are, above all, descriptions of visually navigating industrial modernity and its spectacular scenes, in which fashionably clad women now figured so prominently. The theory of enchantment implies an embodied response that ranges beyond the eyes, to be sure, but it is generally one that originates in the moment of visual contact. It becomes particularly salient in a period in which gazes are being reoriented to feminine bodies in the public sphere and, as Conor puts it, ‘the modern perceptual field reconfigured the meanings of feminine visibility’ (2004: 29).

Early twentieth-century mediations of enchantment like the ones I discuss here reveal the concept at a crossroads. While enchantment’s roots lie in other-worldly experience, this period is distinguished by its transferral of enchanting experience to decidedly earthly contexts, across the metropolitan urban ‘West’. Scholars have ably traced the way aspects of enchantment were deliberately materialised in the creation of consumer experiences, particularly in the feminised spaces of fashion and shopping, and also supported by organs like women’s magazines, which had a close relationship with fashion and retailing. ⁴ So the women’s periodical in the interwar years offers a glimpse of a concept undergoing transformation. The mediations of enchantment in these three magazines confirm that what results from this meeting of experiential forms is the domestication of enchanted experience connected to women, those vectors of consumer culture. They narrate the neutralisation of the alterity revealed by enchantment, and its reorientation to the tropes and institutional organisation of the market. Although representations of enchanted femininity appear to signify absolute alterity, that suggestion of the ungraspable is paradoxically extinguished in the very process in which it is enfolded into consumer culture. For in that enfolding, that appropriation, femininity is assimilated into existing tropes (silhouettes, trends) of the modern woman, and the constant repetition of those intervenes in the suggestion of a femininity that eludes capture and appraisal.

Mediating enchantment in periodicals

The narrations of enchantment that I have shared remind us that enchantment is not innocent, nor is it an experience that can be straightforwardly captured in print media. Though there is a strong consonance between feminist theoretical concerns and the theory of enchantment, enchantment shifts when it is mediated. Looking at the periodical archive for narrations of enchantment does not tell us anything about the ontology of enchantment, the actual experience of it. Instead, it offers a window on the intersection of ideas of enchantment with the ideological contours of early twentieth-century mass culture. Of course, this interface between enchantment and ideology occurred much more broadly than in the pages of these magazines; it animated commerce, and formed the visual and experiential backdrop for life in any modern city. But the textual rendering of enchantment points to the longings and desires, the fears and anxieties that surrounded the appearance of enchantment in consumer culture. It points to the frames that were placed around the very possibility of enchantment as it was connected to the feminine.

The periodical’s mediation of enchantment also raises the question of textually rendering what is, by its very nature, meant to be ungraspable. If, as I note above, enchantment is largely an experience of visual encounter, what is at stake in distilling it in text? What, in particular, is at stake in inserting textual renderings of enchantment into this polyvocal genre, which, as Barbara Green writes, ‘makes meaning through its heterogeneity’ (2012: 462)? Or by spectacular images of feminine beauty – commercial and editorial – that appear to put femininity within reach, enacting a tension with the textual images of wondrous and inexplicable women? First, it is crucial to recognise the generic polyphony of the periodical. This fundamentally heterogeneous form mimics the ambiguity and contradictions of enchantment. The ambiguous nature of enchantment – at once terrifying and seductive, atemporal and yet connected to the earthly pleasures of the marketplace – is beautifully brought into relief by this equally intricate and multiform genre.

The medium, then, does not simply catalogue enchanting women, but structurally contributes to the regulation of the utopian possibilities suggested by enchantment. For example, magazines’ periodicity helps to give meaning to the descriptions of enchantment – not only in themselves, as individual texts, but as constituent elements in a discursive genre that gains its force through its repetition. Periodicals have a peculiar and complex temporal status, which has variously been described as circular, change-oriented, repetitive and infused with novelty. James Mussell’s work explores the character of magazines’ repetition. As he puts it:

The current issue establishes its novelty through the way it differs from its predecessor, yet magazines, like all serials, are predicated on repetition, where novelty is tempered by formal features such as layout, typeface, certain features or articles, even the recurrence of the name itself. (2015a: 70)

Mussell notes elsewhere that ‘the repetition of certain formal features, issue after issue’ provides ‘a mediating framework whose purpose is to reconcile difference by presenting new content in a form already known to readers’ (2015b: 347). This sameness within novelty is hugely significant in the context of mediations of enchantment, since enchantment, as discussed above, involves a shock akin to the shock of the new. In that sense, descriptions of enchantment fit well within the general tone of women’s magazines, especially – as Beetham shows in her discussion of The Queen in Britain – the constant emphasis on new commodities and the importance of being fashionable by wearing the latest modes compounded the sense of the magazine as the representative of the ‘ever-receding present’ (2015: 327). Enchantment was of a piece with the general emphasis on the sensory effects of novelty within fashion-oriented women’s magazines, and with the recurrent depiction of being transported or touched by commodities. But what of enchantment-as-shock when it is set against the backdrop that Mussell describes, of familiarity with the stylistic conventions of the magazine? If, as he suggests, the difference, or newness, being represented in the periodical is reconciled by the reader’s fluency with the medium, then enchantment is potentially domesticated. The encounter demanded by enchantment acquires sameness through its familiarity, mitigating its shock value.

Such a domestication of enchantment is also at play in another way in the frequent repetition of this type of article. Of the authors I examine here, several published similar articles repeatedly – sometimes in great number. For example, Gaston Derys’s column, ‘Chronique Parisienne’, ran in the La Femme Chic de Paris for years. Marcel Astruc, editor of the Gazette for a time, published dozens of articles with a similar insouciant tone. Robert Dieudonné frequently published pieces in La Femme Chic and they were nearly always about new seasons or travel destinations, and almost always engaged in typifying and cataloguing new femininities. And, of course, as I have explained, these seven examples and their authors are not anomalous – they are typical of a sub-genre that characterised these magazines. Their frequency falls in line with the repetition described by Mussell. I suggest that the periodical’s constant repetition of encounters with enchanting women counters these disorienting aspects of enchantment. The mediation of this extraordinary state in a cyclical forum like a magazine renders it ordinary, as it assimilates it into the broader economy of meaning that is represented by the magazine. Enchantment’s novelty – as an experience, as an affect – is tempered by the repetition of the trope of the enchanting feminine across issues, magazines and years, echoing the way that, in publishing magazines, ‘newness is always tempered by things from the past’ (Mussell, 2015a: 70). The nature of enchantment’s mediation in a serial publication ensures that relations with alterity that are introduced by experiences of enchantment are easily neutralised by being made legible. These articles may well describe individual experiences, real or not, of encounter with illegible women. Paradoxically, though, legibility is constituted through the constant proclamation of illegibility. In becoming ubiquitous and taking its place alongside the range of other articles that rely on a quite conventional, and spectacularly available, femininity, the enchanting woman’s illegibility shifts. Perhaps she becomes one among many expressions of modern femininity – no longer other than the modern feminine, she becomes its embodiment.

Further, as the genre becomes familiar, its repetition acts to place the women being described under a kind of watch that they apparently elude, in the supposed experience of enchantment. What is being described here may be a frustrated capacity to understand, but this does not preclude a kind of watchfulness, a surveillance of that which is unseeable but at the same time cannot be let out of sight. In fact, the sheer number of pieces of writing that explore women’s enchanting qualities demonstrates an obsession with describing, with coding, with typing – as I note above, some of the authors’ entire women’s magazine outputs are based in typification, such as Dieudonné’s. The inability to sit with that which is illegible – to let it be – opens onto a play for control over that which seems to evade mastery. Through their proliferation, words discipline the apparently ungovernable. The underhand rhetoric of surveillance, then, colludes with the repetitive periodicity of the magazine to produce an enchanting femininity that is as accessible as other femininities that circulate in these periodicals. Indeed, as fashion and commerce in general came to rely on the creation of enchantment – in everything from individual dress to shopping experiences – the sense of wonder came to be commonplace, and the apparently unusual or enchanting nature of femininity came to be just one among a range of attributes that characterised the modern women.

What is striking about such a construction of femininity is precisely its availability for use, to invoke During’s terms again. As images of enchanting women became accessible through the constant invocation of their inaccessibility, those images had practical value. Indeed, one reads in the compulsion to describe enchanting women a desire to take something from them – their enlivening quality, perhaps. Consider again Dieudonné’s meditation on women and the springtime, which concludes that women have an innate propensity to escape the bonds of ‘civilisation’. This piece brings into focus the importance of the concept of escape and the mastery it provokes – in codifying the propensity to flee and subjecting enchanting women to dissection and analysis, the author makes escape impossible. But he also points to what else is at stake: there might be something for watchful men to extract and learn from their unknowability. They might learn how to plan their own flight from the suffocation of industrial modernity and consumer capitalism, leaving behind the vectors of consumption that begat the experience of enchantment and yet are too closely tied to consumerism: stylish women.

Responding to enchantment as capitalist experience

Indeed these articles, though they describe enchantment by women who are fully imbricated in consumer society, simultaneously reflect a kind of horror of consumerism. The enchantment that I suggest is reflected in the periodical as a modern discourse thus needs to be understood as ambiguously connected to the rise of industrial and consumer capitalism. ⁵ Other instances of enchantment in these magazines that implicitly position feminine magic in relation to modern temporality and consumer capitalism reveal a related but much more negative understanding of enchantment that links it to alienation.

One example is found in a 1923 column in La Femme Chic à Paris. Here, Gaston Derys offers a comment on the ‘mysterious, ephemeral alchemy’ of fashion – and the language in the piece underscores the way that fashion represents femininity, so that the terms could be transposed to describe unknowable, changeable women. Derys details the threat posed by the tyranny of the form, with its mysterious laws: that the public does not understand how fashion operates puts them at aesthetic risk. Not being able to surveil and control the work of fashion is, in this sense, a liability. And it is French fashion’s industrial development that leads to the problem: harmful, money-hungry elements have arisen as a result of new developments in fashion, among them democratisation and industrialisation. What if, he asks, a bunch of awful Dadaist designers tried to establish themselves as the representatives of French fashion and showed outrageous creations, tarnishing the its image? Comparing fashion to the arts of painting and sculpture, Derys considers whether, ‘en face d’un pareil danger, si la mode ne devrait pas sortir d’une sorte d’academie’ (1923: 38). Of course, what he means is akin to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, that establishment institution so closely linked to the French nation.

Here, we find ourselves in quite a different territory with regard to the frustrated gaze at the feminine – and this episode is a navigation as much of femininity as of fashion, because it draws upon the feminised tropes of irrational, changeable fashion. Purveyors of enchantment are presented as a threat, something that demands control. After all, Derys forcefully argues that fashion should be recognised as an art – and that the actions of fame-hungry Dadaist couturiers, playing to their irrational female customers, erode this status. Notably, in this example, the reference to that generally anarchic and itself anti-capitalist form, Dadaism, is trumped by the picture of the democratising industry. In this example, then, the threat posed by fashion’s un-surveillability looks like enchantment – as Surrealist and Dadaist art often does – but it reveals precisely the opposite of the capacity to enchant. In fact, it threatens to disenchant the world by contributing to an overall aesthetic degradation. Fashion’s enchanting capacities are in this sense linked to alienation, to modernity’s erosion of the beautiful, the harmonious and the graceful – all words that Derys invokes. In this sense, this subset of articles in this genre exploring feminine mystery reveals that the other side of modernity’s enchantment is alienation. It implicitly aligns the unsurveillable, fashionable feminine body with modern alienation, in a modern tradition we can trace at least as far back as Baudelaire.

A pair of articles extend this diagnosis of the dual nature of fashionable, feminine illegibility as enchanting and alienating. They appeared in 1920 and 1921 in the Gazette du Bon Ton. Each describes an encounter or series of encounters with a woman wearing a fashion of the moment. One, ‘Apparences’ (Lauwick, 1921), offers short narratives about several women, each of whom dresses in what is essentially trompe-l’oeil clothing – garments that seem to be something they are not (one is a dress that appears to be a two-piece suit, one is a suit that looks like a winter coat). The second, ‘Métamorphoses’ (Astruc, 1920), is written as a second-person address to a woman wearing a garment that looks different from the front and from the back, thus challenging the harmony of the feminine line that is so prized in these magazines.

In both cases, the authors link the women’s shocking clothes to a sense that the spectators are under threat from women’s visual unavailability. In ‘Métamorphoses’, the author tells the woman he is addressing that her dress suits her. Why? ‘Car elle est trompeuse, différente du devant et du dos, de l’avers et du revers’ (Astruc, 1920: 314). He then sets up a scenario in which he is, with relief, enjoying ten minutes of calm next to his beloved:

Pour savourer mon Bonheur, je ferme les yeux. Fatale Imprudence; en les rouvrant, je ne vous trouve plus. Vous êtes là, pourtant, visible et méconnaissable, à deux pas de ma main tandis que je pleure, sur ma flûte à moi, votre fuite. Passez muscade: vous vous êtes retournée, et vous m’avez montré l’autre côté de votre robe. (1920: 315)

Here, the effect again suggests a frustrated gaze, the same play of illegibility that is inherent in the narrations of enchantment. But the aggression that is latent here means that the effect in this case is not enchantment. This scene, and that detailed in ‘Apparences’, though they certainly contain an element of playful irony, can be read as expressions of anger at challenges to capture and control in this new visual economy of the unknowable feminine. Alienation is surely at work here as well; here the male subject is alienated from his traditional role as master of the visual field – and the feminine. What appears in some articles as a snapshot of touching lost possibilities for revelry and wholeness through the ungraspability of women, appears elsewhere as being led closer to alienation.

In ‘Apparences’, the origin of such aggression become clearer. After detailing encounters with three dissimulating garments, Hervé Lauwick writes that ‘la malice des femmes est infernale’ (1921: 31). He concludes the article by invoking himself as an ‘homme timide, dans ces rues hostiles’ (1921: 31). Of course this is a satirical invocation of longstanding cultural narratives about men’s and women’s relationships. But it is linked, in this article, to questions of spectacle and dissimulation. This underlines the stakes of the representation and hints that a playful satire may be linked to a deeper discourse about women’s visual treachery. Lauwick’s opening vignette, about a garment that looks like a long tunic but is actually a one-piece dress, describes a deliberate performance. The wearer, Corisande, ‘se penche avec ironie et detachement sur la grille du balcon’ in a contrived act of unconcerned display (1921: 30). As women call out that they admire her garment, she sighs : ‘Ce n’est pas une jaquette, dit-elle … Elle était sure de son effet, comme on dit au théâtre. Et, comme on dit en couture, c’était un effet – en effet!’ (1920: 30). The scene is thus framed as performative; it advances a familiar conception of femininity as artifice.

To be sure, the Gazette is distinct among French magazines in its appeal to artifice. Nevertheless, this article ultimately suggests a disdain both for women caught up in fashion trends, whose performance is deemed too subject to external whim, and for women looking at other women, who reveal their duplicity when they compliment the wearer while thinking ill of her styling of the garment, flattering themselves that they would wear it better. ⁶ The article attaches artifice to some of the variety of misogynistic tropes attached to femininity as performative: lacking aesthetic agency by being subject to the whims of designers, and competing with other women for beauty and attention, conceived as limited resources. To return to the concept of alienation that runs through the periodicals as the obverse of the narrative of enchantment: a sense of alienation derives from the inability to master the feminine, as I describe above. But a closer analysis clarifies that this unmasterability connects to a second sense of alienation inaugurated by an intensifying and accelerating industrial culture of fashion and beauty, which runs on women’s susceptibility to artifice and to commercial predation. As so many commentators have recognised, fashion at once epitomises the delirious aesthetic promise of the modern, and the degradations of consumption. In this sense, it is an ideal vector for this duality of enchantment and alienation – and its media become the sites for the expansion of this sentiment from visual to verbal.

Conclusions: women’s magazine as masculine space?

Of course, the construction of women as Janus-faced bearers of enchanting experience that is at once seductive and destructive is not without precedent: in the French context, it can be linked to Baudelaire, to the decadents, and to moral panics about la fille moderne in the 1920s. But tracking the appearance and mediation of feminine enchantment through the singular medium of the women’s periodical – where it was tied to both masculine gaze and masculine authorship – reveals some of what was at stake in the textual rendering of this concept in the interwar decades. This genre gave voice to the apparently unrepresentable, and subjected it to the complex temporal arrangements orchestrated by periodicity. A unique constellation of French women’s in/visibility emerged. The space of the periodical, ostensibly devoted to and saturated with feminine imagery, enfolded the very thing that was imagined to be the guarantor of women’s difference and their unmasterability – their enigmatic, enchanting qualities – into a worldly, usable and even tangible quality. At the same time, narrations of this experience as alienating confirmed the need for containment of the threat posed by modern womanhood.

These pieces thus illustrate a significant counter-current to the prevailing tone and output of fashion magazines, which are generally characterised by what Tiersten has called marketplace modernism. Tiersten’s influential 2001 work takes on the gendering of consumption in Belle Époque France, tracing the birth of ‘chic’ and the new reign of ‘taste’ as part of the development of a new form of bourgeois individualism intimately connected with the burgeoning consumer marketplace. The market was ‘reinvented as the locus of feminine citizenship’ (2001: 8) in which ‘the rationality of the chic consumer of taste was opposed to frivolity and aesthetic corruption’ (2001: 122) In this way, Tiersten suggests, the rise of consumerism could be incorporated into Republicanism instead of imagined as a threat. She shows that fashion magazines were significant vehicles for the presentation of this view of consumption and the rational female consumer (2001: 134–41).

Yet periodical studies remind us how complex any magazine was. While it is true that most fashion journals showcased marketplace modernism’s ‘subjective and mundane experience rather than formal education and training’ (Tiersten, 2001: 122), they carried within them a counter-tendency, most easily detectable in the genre of articles written by men. So many of the features of any fashion magazine are, essentially, empirical: detailed descriptions of clothing, accessories, interiors, weddings, parties, boutiques and street scenes. They contain localised descriptions of objects, itemisations of chic. But the works by male authors do something very different. In direct opposition to marketplace modernism with its expressions of the mundane, these pieces are strikingly universalising. Rather than detailing objects, they seek to read moods and types, aiming to order and extract a deeper significance for these. Further, whereas Tiersten’s contention is that marketplace modernism civilised the unruly individual, enfolding her into the Republic, the generic counterpoint that these articles represent expresses a de-civilising impulse, in which the woman’s enchantment is tied to her vestigial otherness to civilisation, and she even bears the possibility of transmitting this to the men with whom she is in contact. Enchantment, as I read it across this minority genre, emerges as a marker of a possible other-than – but in its domestication and use, its alterity is extinguished.

This has implications, I think, for our conceptions of the women’s magazine. In feminist periodical studies, there has been a strong emphasis on the rise of the women’s periodical as a kind of women’s space, which added important complexity to the tendency to characterise women’s magazines monolithically as purveyors of masculinist ideology (see Beetham, 1996; Snyder, 1998; Aronson, 2001; Berlanstein, 2007). The dual representation of women’s enchanting qualities – as something that could be mined and something that required mastery – served to undermine any sense of the magazine as a straightforwardly ‘feminine’ or ‘feminised’ space; rather, a close look at narrations of enchantment provides a much more complex picture of the medium as a site of struggle and contestation, a terrain as much of masculine authority as of the assertion of feminine agency. Though I am in general agreement with Amy Aronson’s (2010: 32) call to recognise the women’s magazine as a ‘noisy, complex’ ‘miscellany’, the genre I have traced here asks us to consider placing more emphasis on the constituent co-presence of masculine authority in a form that seems to be all about women. ⁷