Location📍 Art Institute of Chicago → Gallery 226

The Millinery Shop

Edgar Degas’s 'The Millinery Shop' is the largest of his paintings focused on milliners. Edgar Degas arranged the composition carefully, making multiple drawings and pastels of the lone figure, perfecting the woman’s pose, and experimenting with her outfit. The final composition highlights the visual ambiguities of class identity that arose in France in the late nineteenth century. The woman sits in a hat shop examining a wide-brimmed hat, wearing a fashionable green wool dress with elegant long gloves that could be worn by either wealthy clients or shop employees. At the time, millinery was considered a prestigious trade that required skill and taste, incrementally elevating the young women who succeeded in the business. Edgar Degas addressed this subtle shift in class hierarchy through the subject’s fashion: While her dress is nice enough to be worn by an affluent woman, she does not wear a hat of her own, which would have been expected of a high-class young lady. The artist portrayed this newfound uncertainty playfully by positioning the hat with green trimmings so it seems to sit atop the woman’s head.