The Ladies' Paradise: Artifact Study

The Ladies’ Paradise artifact study project was a response to a challenge from the International Textile and Apparel Association to incorporate Émile Zola’s The Ladies Paradise into an undergraduate or graduate course in the textile and apparel curriculum. The Ladies Paradise is a mid-nineteenth century novel about the rise of the department store in Paris. The challenge was taken up in a graduate-level course that employs material culture methodology to study fashion history. Students read the novel and noted the names and descriptions of items sold in the novel’s fictional department store which was modeled after Le Bon Marché in Paris. Each student researched an artifact from the University of Rhode Island’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection. Shortened versions of their papers are included here.