'Whereas men go to London for suits & shirts, women all dream of being dressed in Paris' is an aphorism formulated to promote the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Art Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, but one that has rarely been challenged in the intervening century. This new book, entitled Deco Dandy, which broadly interrogates the intersecting histories of urban modernity, cultural patrimony, national masculinity and global capitalism, as played out in the democratization of luxury design in the French capital during the interwar decades, shows how such axioms have become centralized assumptions in the history of modern design.Throughout his perceptive narrative, John Potvin demonstrates that the collapsing of consumption into femininity, as visualized and materialized in and around the 1925 exhibition, has unfairly obscured the presence of men, in general, and queer men, in particular, as consumers of mass culture. As such the relation of men to the evolution of commodity fetishism, as delineated by the gargantuan 1925 exhibition, Potvin states, 'has yet to be uncovered, explored and theorised' (p. 13). Women, he argues, are too easily yoked to Art Deco, or the style moderne as it was known before and after the exhibition, at the expense of any serious or sustained interrogation of their male counterparts.The book contends that the equation of women with the shopping bonanza inaugurated by various socio-economic and political factors in interwar France, which coalesced in the spectacle of the 1925 exhibition and the 'lifestyle modernism' it promoted, is at best over simplistic and one dimensional, and at worst feeds a false binary that pits the supposed passive femininity of consumerism against the hypermasculine agency of the avant-garde. Paris as sexualized and feminized, as both muse and mistress to modernism, Potvin asserts, has long been contested by feminist historians (pp. 2-3), but a lack of acknowledgment of even the existence of the homosocial and homosexual exposes more than just gaps in knowledge but lays bare the problem of the authorization and reproduction of knowledge in itself.
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