Fictive Fashions: Alfred Grevin's Imaginary
Costumes and the 'New Eve'

Alfred Grevin is perhaps best known today as the founder of the Musee Grevin, a Parisian wax museum which exists today not far from the famous Moulin Rouge. But this man was also a popular illustrator for periodicals such as Le Journal Amusant, primary artist and editor of the Almanach Parisiennes and a well-known costume designer for theatrical productions including La Fille de Mme. Angot.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Grevin also achieved a reputation for inventing (or recording) a type of Parisian woman who became known as the Grevin type (les petites grevineries parisiennes); his activities inspired the playwright Beauvallet to pen the theatrical presentation Les Jolies filles de A. Grevin. Over a span of some twenty years, Grevin produced images of this mostly imaginary woman and designed for her costumes that transformed her into a variety of flora and fauna. It will be demonstrated that the costumes, as well as the construction of the woman who modeled those designs, are related to the concept of the "new woman" in Paris -- called "The New Eve."

This female type embodied the idea of artistic creation and combined masculine fears of the women's rights movement (then gaining support in France) with masculine desire for a domestic, controllable female. For centuries artists and advertisers have utilized a system which divided images of women into "good" or "bad" through the use of gender stereotypes.

Victor Joze, writer for La Plume, defined the separate spheres that men and women should inhabit. Man's world was the public, physical place of activity; woman's the private, emotional seat of maternity. Any migration of the female away from that emotional world, Joze believed, would result in the inversion of "natural order" and create a dangerous social condition. Called the femme nouvelle by art critics Camille Mauclair and Marius-Ary Leblond, the characteristics of the potentially dangerous woman were three: she was independent, critical and mobile.

The "Femme-Fatale," a feminine type made of part fantasy and part reality, not only provided a challenge to patriarchal order but also posed a threat to the very masculinity of the male population in France during the latter nineteenth century. The "New Eve" (also called a "daughter of Eve") can be seen as a second type created as part of a constellation of feminine types that were intended as tongue-in-cheek warnings for the men and gentle instruction for the female population. Significantly both the "New Eve" and the "Femme-Fatale" originate in popular culture sources of the 1860's and are gradually transformed during the period of the French Third Republic into sometimes sinister, and always stereotypical, visions of femininity.

The visualization of feminine evil was part and parcel of a much larger cultural context which included a mass-produced consumer culture, a burgeoning high-fashion industry and changes in the private and public relationships between the sexes. It is through the examination of this larger context that both the "New Eve" and the "Femme-Fatale" can come to be understood as a volatile mixture of fashion and the feminine body, embodying both an advertisement of sensuality and a warning against indulgence in physical pleasure.

The "Femme-Fatale" wears the latest Parisian fashions, however, while the "New Eve" is clothed in the trappings of Eden. She "becomes" a variety of flowers, plants and insects in her Grevin costumes. She also can found nude, "wearing" and embracing only a serpent. The fashions Grevin created reinforced the idea of woman as "closer to nature" and therefore removed from "culture"-- the domain of man. Perhaps most of all, the Femme Fatale and the New Eve serve as a visual manifestations of conflicting masculine impulses towards women in general and the then burgeoning women's rights movement in particular. This presentation will consider the development of the "New Eve" and her "natural" attire in popular media and interpret her importance against the larger narrative of gender relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Paris.