The Dematerialization of Fashion and France's Couture Propaganda during the 1960s and 1970s

The Dematerialization of Fashion and France's Couture Propaganda during the 1960s and 1970s

FASHION IN IR aims to study the role of French women’s sartorial fashion in its international relations with a focus on both its interaction with the Common Market and its influence on the American mass market during the 1960s and 1970s. This approach is meant to open up the fields of Fashion History and International Relations History to each other. This will be done through the analysis of the influence of women’s sartorial fashion on the American mass market as well as within the context of the Common Market through the prism of the French authorities (industrial, governmental and diplomatic). In so doing, the added-value of diplomatic archival materials in the study of fashion–its influence and dissemination–will be compounded by the added-value of integrating fashion as an independent and unavoidable variable on the international stage. This project brings the political perspective of international relations as a new approach to the study of both the creative industry and the ways intellectual property can be appropriated by states as well as influence public authorities to act in certain ways at the behest of those creators of immaterial products such as fashion (both ideas and images). In so doing, the goal of this project is to generate a new interdisciplinary perspective pertaining to the study of European cultural heritage in the context of international and transnational competition of immaterial cultural goods. This project uses the renewal of an aid to couture program at the end of the 1960s in France as a case study of the instrumentalization of a part of European culture in the form of haute couture as a means to gain influence in the United States.