What to read after Designs on Modernity?

Designs on modernity presents the 1925 Paris Exhibition as a key moment in the attempts to update the image of Paris, 'capital of the nineteenth century'. At the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoatifs et Industriels Modernes, the city of Paris itself, as much as the commodity, was put on show.

No mere backdrop, the French capital was deployed as a framing device for the goods displayed. Tag Gronberg focuses on the Exhibition as a set of contesting representations of the modern city, stressing the importance of consumption and displayed for concepts of urban modernity. Here, Le Corbusier's now famous Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveua with its Plan Voisin for the redesign of Paris confronted another equally up-to-date city: 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.