DESIGNS ON MODERNITY

Paris as a woman s city , world centre of fashion and shopping. Gronberg s exploration of the ostensibly more frivolous modern city reveals how luxury, as opposed to the Le Corbusian ideals of standardisation and mass-production, functioned as an index of modernity. Taking as her starting point on of the most dramatic 1925 exhibits, the rue des Boutiques, which spanned the river Seine, Gronberg analyses the contemporary significance of the small Parisian luxury shop. She shows how boutiques, conceived both as urbanism and as advertising, redefined Paris as the modern city. By emphasising the importance of shops and shopping, this books casts new light on French visual culture of the 1920s as well as on the role of gender in formulations of early twentieth-century modernity.