Véronique POUILLARD

Véronique Pouillard

Premier assistant

Adresse

Université Libre de Bruxelles
Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres
Histoire
50, Av. F.D. Roosevelt, CP 175/01
1050 Bruxelles

Activités en études américaines

  • John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing Award, Duke University, 2001.
  • BAEF Fellowship, European Institute and Department of History, Columbia University, 2006-2007.
  • Visiting Scholar, European Institute and Department of History, Columbia University, 2007-2008.
  • Harvard-Newcomen Post-Doctoral Fellow in Business History, Harvard Business School, 2008-2009.

Current research project

Industry of Dreams. The Paris-New York fashion Business, 1929-1960s.
The history of fashion has been increasingly explored over the last decade, but two important and intertwined features of the topic are still underdeveloped: business and its international aspect. These dimensions are crucial. Fashion is first and foremost an industry of exportation. Between the wars, the tension between design creativity and business is an important feature for understanding the challenges faced by the industry. This tension was most evident in the case of the interchange between Paris and New York, the first considered the international creative fashion center and the second considered its commercial counterpart. It was often stated that the cities were so different that fashion could not be defined in the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. Until the 1960s, Paris was mostly producing Haute Couture garments made-to-measure for wealthy private customers and purchased by the international fashion business for wide-scale reproduction. I show in this study that beyond this structure, multiple processes of cross-fertilization were at work between both cities allowing for the formation of a single industry based mostly on small-scale enterprises. The exchanges reached their highest pitch with regard to the delicate issue of copyrighting couture designs. The attitudes, and the strategies that grew out of them, of the Paris and New York industries with regard to commerce and more precisely with regard to legal reproduction and illegal copying are investigated through the activity of employer syndicates and lobbies, in relation to enterprise and government. This research addresses the interdependence between the French and American fashion industries and markets during three successive periods of crises: the Depression, WWII, and the post-war reconstruction. Understanding how the industry survived these three crises is crucial to understanding the development of its contemporary structure.

Sélection de publications en études américaines

  • “Ernest Dichter, Reception and Resistance to Motivational Research in French-Speaking Europe” (titre de travail), R. Gries, S. Schwarzkopf éd., The Open Persuader: Ernest Dichter. Motivation Research and the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture, New York-Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009 (à paraître).
  • “American Advertising Agencies in Europe: J. Walter Thompson’s Belgian Business in the Interwar Years”, in: Business History, vol. 47, n°1, 2005, pp. 44-58.
  • « La puissance du modèle américain. Les agences publicitaires dans la Belgique de l’entre-deux-guerres », in: Le Temps des Médias. Revue d’Histoire, n°2, printemps 2004, pp. 49-58.