Fashion after World War II: a comparative history between Japan and France

Three Fashion historians, coming from France and Japan, are invited

Rika Fujioka will present:  The development of Japanese ready-made clothes market, 1950s- 1970s. Rika Fujioka is Professor at the Kansai University and has conducted extensive researches on Japanese Department Stores.

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Sophie Chapdelaine de Montvalon will present a history of the retail chain Prisunic: Prisunic: An approach of an ecosystem of style in a French retail chain, 1949 – 1969. Sophie is a French author who has published on two famous Fashion Prediction figures in Paris after WWII, titled Le beau pour tous.

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Sophie Kurkdjian will present: French fashion journalists and the development of ready-to-wear in the magazines Elle and Jardin des modes, 1945-1965. She is a French scholar and the head of the sole  «Fashion History Seminar» in France. Her thesis was about the history of the French Vogue and especially the two figures behind its success, and titled: Lucien Vogel et Michel de Brunhoff, parcours croisés de deux éditeurs de presse illustrée au XXème siècle.

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Finally, textile historian Chris Nierstrasz, who took his PhD in Leiden and a post-doc in Warwick and is presently teaching at the ESHCC, will present his new book about tea and textile Trade in the early modern period: Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles. The English and Dutch East India companies (1700-1800) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

This new study expands the focus to cover the East India Companies' global empires in a comparison of the rivalry between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the East India Company (EIC) in their trade in tea and Indian textiles. The reasons for the success and failure of both companies in this fierce competition need to be found in Europe, Asia and the wider Atlantic. Although the impact of this trade is already visible in events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution, this book also puts the rivalry in the perspective of difference in the varieties of tea and textiles both companies brought back to Europe.

To download the abstract, click here.