Negotiations En Vogue

This paper explores Romanian women’s influence on US fashion, as representatives of European artistic, cultural and social elites and as genuine Parisiennes. This study treats the Parisienne model as a symbolic marker of elegance driven by French, namely Parisian, aesthetic philosophies and technical prowess. In this sense, Romanian women function as liminal agents of influence and scrutiny, in-between local, regional, continental and worldwide ethnic, cultural, social, ideological and religious identities. The research focuses on primary visual and textual materials published in the original American edition of Vogue, based in New York. These sources, including fashion and news reports, photographs, illustrations, and full-length articles are analyzed in the context of Romanian-American cultural and aesthetic negotiations, using an informed disciplinary methodology focusing on fashion studies and discourse analysis of written and visual texts. Interwar Romanian women’s impact on European and American fashion remains a largely unexplored topic. This paper aims to open a new field of enquiry, adding fashion studies in the media to the diversity of topics regarding Romanian-American cultural and artistic negotiations.

Key Words: fashion icons, women, interwar era, American Vogue, USA, Romania