‘Vivre l’époque’: A relational reading of mood, selfhood and feminist world-making in the work of Sonia Rykiel

This article aims to recontextualize the work of French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel from an affiliative point of view by disentangling the various relations caught up in the materialization of her designs. In her démode manifesto from 1977, Rykiel states that her design practice was a way of ‘translating the political mood of the day’, a statement against fashion’s time-based hierarchies of trends and diktats. Through a concentric, relational reading of these creations, informed by mood theory, as well as feminist notions related to the sociocultural milieu of Rykiel, such as Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine and Antoinette Fouque’s libido creandi , the article aims to draw out the importance of a relational perspective for fashion studies. By elucidating how a design poetic can express the changes in mood of a certain time, place and sociocultural milieu, we can understand how it can, in turn, affect this milieu and its mood.