Classic Chic

Mary E. Davis's Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism is a fascinating study that draws together several strands of international modernism in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Focusing on trendsetting couturiers and magazines, she reveals how fashion not only promoted modernist trends in music but also identified those trends with a 'modern' upper-class lifestyle as well as similar trends in the visual arts and ballet. Davis has written a page-turner that talks about serious matters and adds to the sum of our knowledge about early twentieth-century musical culture.-Lynn Garafola, author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century DanceIn Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, Mary Davis examines the deep connections between music and other cultural phenomena - especially fashion - in early 20th-century France. She returns the music of Satie and Stravinsky to its native Parisian habitat, which swarmed with fashion designers, trend-setting collaborators, and the purveyors of taste who determined what at any moment counted as 'chic.' (How dreadfully un-German!) Classic Chic joins a very small number of books that both break new scholarly ground and also appeal to general readers: in particular, those willing to listen to Gymnopédies while flipping through the pages of Vanity Fair.-Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical FormClassic Chic is an original and fascinating exploration of the surprising alliance of music and fashion in the early twentieth century. Mary Davis has made an important contribution to our understanding of modernism through a subtle analysis of supposedly 'frivolous and ephemeral' art forms.-Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology