Programs and Communities

While the majority of the scholarship around surrealist relationships with fashion look at the era of the 1930s onwards, this article considers the first period of surrealism during the 1920s, including its prehistory in the mouvement flou as it emerged via Paris Dada and Littérature, asking two related questions: what was the presence and status of the discourse of fashion for surrealism during these formative years; and in what kinds of fashion practices did its members engage? In response to the first of these, an examination of the group’s journals, publications and documents suggests that fashion stands as a significant and abiding area of interest for the group and its members. Writings by André Breton, Louis Aragon, René Crevel and others are correlated with surrealist images and artworks to reflect upon this sustained and informed engagement with men’s and above all women’s fashion, and suggest a particularly keen awareness of the changes in clothing styles over the recent past. The second question has rarely been asked in a systematic way: how did the early Parisian surrealists reflect these interests in their own day-to-day fashion choices and preferences? Given that the majority of the early Parisian surrealist group was male, the focus here is predominantly on men’s fashion, and analysis of memoirs, correspondence and documents such as the photographs taken in the Bureau de recherches surréalistes provides evidence of collective and individual positions. The fashion choices of Simone and André Breton form a particular area of concern, revealing some nuanced developments and unorthodox moments in their day-to-day attitudes.

During his wartime exile in New York City, André Breton responded to the popular entrenchment of Surrealism as a language of shop window merchandising by leading a small group of artists and writers to take the publicity of Surrealism into their own hands. At Breton’s behest, Marcel Duchamp designed three shop windows to advertise texts released by the French publishing arm of the Fifth Avenue bookstore Brentano’s in 1943 and 1945. Although art historians have called attention to the relationship between these designs and the iconography of better-known works by Duchamp, this paper considers them as instantiations of Breton’s evolving thought within the context of a commercial environment already saturated with surrealist imagery. It places them within an iconographic web that includes, among others, Salvador Dalí’s famed fashion displays of the preceding decade, multiple iterations of Duchamp’s “twine,” and works by Kurt Seligmann, Roberto Matta, and Breton himself. The paper argues that, exemplifying the prewar surrealist motif of interior and exterior permeability and bringing it to a breaking point, these obscure windows for French-language texts became an important laboratory for the engaged critique of consumerism that would come to the forefront of the surrealist movement during the postwar period.