Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Franco-American Colors : Paris Fashion Meets the New York Rag Trade. This paper explores the relationship between the US mass market and Parisian high style in the interwar years. Specifically, it focuses on connections between the Textile Color Card Association of America (TCCA) and Paris, the world's fashion capital, following professional networks and information flows to consider exactly how French tastemakers influenced the American mass market. Once entirely dependent on Parisian palettes, New York's fashionindustrial complex became more self-sufficient during World War I, creating mechanisms to generate color forecasts for the American mass market. Issued by the TCCA, the Standard Color Card of America meshed the US imperatives for standardization, simplification, and the democratization of fashion with the cultural cachet long associated with Paris.

International Fashion Congresses of the 1950s and 1960s as the Site for the Production of Soviet Fashion. As the socialist bloc emerged, the bipolar vision of the world extended to the world of fashion. International Fashion Congresses served as opportunities for designers of Central and Eastern European countries and of the Soviet Union to assemble annually. These Congresses became occasions to conceptualize and legitimate a specifically socialist model of fashion, defined in opposition to bourgeois fashion. In this way, politics began to shape clothing design, regulating socialist « taste » and what people wore. However, the designers themselves were as fascinated as ever by French haute couture, whose trends and theoretical principles remained the absolute standard to follow, albeit in a somewhat disguised manner. But the Congresses were also seen as places to exchange know-how concerning styles and how they might be elaborated within a system of mass planning and production. That required the presence of industrial officials who looked at fashion with a more practical eye, thus restraining the creativity of the designers. Because the International Fashion Congresses figured in the preparation of the collections, the selection of the designs, and the methods of public presentation, they permit us to analyse the interaction between Soviet administrators, designers and consumers, and thus to re-evaluate the process of normalization of everyday life.

Royal Charity and Hospital Crisis : The'Impossible' Creation of a Hospital for Children in Lisbon (1858-1878). Although originally foreseen for sick children, the Lisbon Estefânia Hospital opened in 1878, twenty years after its foundation, as an institution for adults. The complex creation of this hospital reflects an extremely rich period in Portuguese hospital history. In a country marked by a progressive secularisation of public services such as assistance, and at a time when public authorities showed increasing interest in childhood protection issues, questions of morality and hygiene encouraged a separate hospital for the youngest patients. However the city hospitals of the Portuguese capital were also in the middle of a crisis (lack of beds, obsolete structures, a mixing up of certain pathologies), which gave rise to a vigorous debate concerning the size, location and design of their facilities. Although the urgency of needs prevented the creation of an exclusively pediatric hospital, the opening of a service reserved for children at the Estefânia hospital marked the starting point of pediatric hospitalisation in Portugal.

Lariboisière : A Hospital for Parisian Workers. A Study of the Clients and the Functions of a Modern Hospital in 1887. Viewed as one of the late nineteenth century's most modern hospitals, Lariboisière (like Tenon a little later) was considered the jewel of the Assistance Publique's new system. It modelled a novel approach to public hospitals in working-class neighborhoods. As for the clientele of the new hospital, it is interesting to discover that Lariboisière served a relatively young population of people who had recently arrived in Paris. If they appeared to be, for the most part, well-established professionally, they were much less so in terms of family : they were often individuals living alone and new to Paris. A closer look at the professional background of the hospital patients offers a picture of the population in the surrounding neighborhoods, for the most part, from the working and lower-middle class. At the same time, economic precariousness was a familiar presence. In particular, a study of in-patient practices and patterns reveals a fairly modern and secular approach to medicine; the expectations were not so much that the hospital would dispense charity and support, but that it would help to care for, cure or palliate causes of illness which were increasingly identified. Medical advances and hospital practices proceeded hand-in-hand, and, in so doing, furnished proof that such progress was understood by at least a part, if not all, of the population, whose confidence in the hospital as an institution grew.