In this highly original book, Susan E. Hiner looks behind fashion’s seams and focuses on the women fashion producers – both working- and middle-class – who were key to shaping the French fashion economy. Behind the Seams thus opens up the fields of both fashion and French cultural studies and explores new ways of understanding the 19th century by demonstrating that these women’s complex and contradictory roles as producers of luxury items left them exploited by an oppressive fashion system even as they served as influencers within it.In 19th-century France, fashion was a powerful and lucrative network that depended on women’s expert manipulation of its raw materials.The delicate finger work of seamstresses and modistes yielded frothy dresses and ethereal hats; the subtle, persuasive rhetoric of written chronicles resulted in savvy, targeted marketing campaigns of goods and lifestyles; and the stylized visual splendour of the detailed drawing, engraving, and painting of fashion plates f