The Ladies' Paradise

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 the eleventh novel in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty books, which follows the lives of a fictional family during the Second French Empire (1852-1870). Serialized first in a magazine, the novel was published in 1883. Also translated as The Ladies' Delight, the novel follows the development of the modern department store during the middle of the 19th century.

Students in a graduate-level course took up the challenge, employing material culture methodology to study fashion history while reading Zola's work. Students 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 then identified and researched an artifact from the University of Rhode Island’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection that corresponded to one mentioned in the book.