Perfecțiune și bun gust

Perfection And Good Taste: Redefining Feminine Identities in Interwar Bucharest Through Fashion and Beauty || This paper explores gender realities in interwar Bucharest through the lens of fashion and beauty. The aim is to evaluate the impact of advice literature on women in reinventing feminine identity and the general effect of these evolutions in interwar Romania. I will analyze visible instances of fashion in the so-called Little Paris spaces in interwar Bucharest. As fashion studies inherently imply an interdisciplinary approach of textile and cosmetic items conception, production, dissemination, consumption and interpretation, this paper proposes a panoramic illustration of Bucharest through its fashion-consuming women. For this purpose, this study will combine a semiotic reading of visual and written texts, added to methodological approaches from sociology, cultural, gender and urban studies, as well as literature. The elegant fashion-consuming Bucharester will be presented as a reflection of her local, national, regional and international context, for a comprehensive understanding of historical and current events both in Romania and at a global level. Consequently, womens fashion becomes a remarkable instrument in analysing gender histories and their outcomes to this day. fashion, beauty, women, interwar Bucharest, Romania, identity.