Fashion, Work, and Politics in Modern France

This history of coiffure in modern France illuminates a host of important twentieth-century issues: the course of fashion, the travails of small business in a modern economy, the complexities of labour reform, the failure of the Popular Front, the temptations of Pétainism, all accompanied by a parade of waves, chignons, and curls.

STEVE ZDATNY is Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University, USA. He is the editor of Hairstyles and Fashion: A Hairdresser’s History of Paris, 1910-1920 (Berg, 1999) and the author of The Politics of Survival: Artisans in Twentieth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 1990).