Through the cross-analysis of images, interviews and garments, this volume charts the dawn of the French ready-made clothing industry between 1945 and 1968, linking it to national reconstruction and modernisation, gender identities and ideas of modernity.

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy. Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68. By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

"This carefully researched and illustrated book offers a vibrant cultural history of French ready-to-wear, and of the ways its organization, promotion and representation are intimately connected to conceptions of identity, femininity and modernity." - Agnès Rocamora, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK

"This important book responds with both clarity and finesse to a lack of in-depth studies of a key period in the history of fashion: the post-war era, when everything had to be reinvented; and during which the rise of Prêt à Porter and its creative proliferation in the 1960s mirrored the upheavals taking place within society." - Géraldine-Julie Sommier, Chloé Archive director, Paris, France

"Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women offers a compelling narrative of national reconstruction and gender identity in the ready-to-wear clothing industry of post-World War II France. Alexis Romano skillfully unpacks the relationship between fashion photography, women’s magazines and the city of Paris, and by interpreting fashion’s representations through the lens of political theory the author also makes an important contribution to methodology." - Francesca Berry, University of Birmingham, UK