‘Clothes make an awful difference in a girl’: Mlle. Modiste, Irene and Funny Face as Cinderella fashion musicals

The world of fashion has been a frequent setting for the many Broadway musicals inspired by Charles Perrault’s Cinderella (1697). Using two Broadway musicals and one Hollywood musical as cross-historical case studies, this article examines how the American musical has variously adapted and interpreted themes of ‘clothes make the woman’ by posing Cinderella as a shop girl or model in fields of consumer fashion. The 1905 Victor Herbert/Henry Blossom operetta Mlle. Modiste, and the 1919 Cinderella musical Irene (by James Montgomery, Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy) both assert the democratizing power of fashion. In Mlle. Modiste, the resourceful title character uses both her singing talent and her access to stylish clothing to rise in the world as an opera diva, as well as a viscount’s wife. Irene emphasizes themes of masquerade and meritocracy, as the eponymous Irish American shop girl models dresses for couturier ‘Madame Lucy’, fools high society as a pedigreed lady and marries her Prince Charming. By contrast, the 1957 Paramount movie musical Funny Face problematizes its heroine’s fashion-world makeover. While Funny Face’s narrative depicts the transformation of Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), a bookish ‘Greenwich Village Cinderella’, into a glamorous Paris mannequin, Funny Face’s musical numbers, use strategies of camp and parody to undercut the concept of ‘The Quality Woman’.