This paper focuses on Colette's writing for the periodical press, particularly her writing on fashion, and sets out to discuss it in terms of its capacity to effect the high purposes of satire. Its method of reading is contextualizing, rather than immanent — it brings it into relation with a number of issues on which it bears: the history of fashion, the history of the body, generational change, the visual determinants of the fashions of the early twentieth century. Although humour is prominent, Colette is not content merely to make jokes. Ancient satire, which derives from the rhetoric of praise and blame, is the source of literary and art criticism, and Colette borrows both its modes and its vocation to elevate fashion writing to the level of cultural critique. Moralistic, it teaches something about social mores by making fun of them. Hence, Colette makes us laugh at the fact that fashion affects not only clothes, but bodies; style fashions the body and hence the self.
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