Clogs and Corsets: popular satire on the french way in the First Republic

Abstract

In the first decades of the Republic, the streets of the main Brazilian capital cities, especially of Rio de Janeiro and Recife, recently urbanized based on the Haussmanian Paris and smiled upon by the fever of cosmopolitanism that invested Europe, women had been used as runways where they could exhibit her imitated or imported models, especially in Paris. The iconography of the time and the advertisements conveyed by magazines and illustrated periodicals, such as the Almanach de Pernambuco and the magazine Kosmos, for instance, form the testimonies of the massive presence of the French in Rio and Recife, owners of stores and maisons, interested in fulfill the demands of the republican public. In spite of the Strong adherence of the Brazilians to the sociability models to the imported from Europe, the less-favored classes, through the popular literature, showed some resistance to these changes in the habits and clothing, especially in the Northeast, where traces of the Catholic and patriarchal moral and mentality were still alive.