In 1800, an ordinance issued by the Paris Police Prefecture prohibited women from wearing men’s clothing. This form of fraud, going possibly as far as taking on a male identity, existed. The French proverbial « l’habit ne fait pas le moine », literally “the robes don’t make the monk” effectively highlights this “danger” to society.

Many women would choose to dress as the opposite sex in everyday life, at work or on stage. Incidentally, they were the preferred targets of caricaturists. A subversive figure, they often incarnated women’s emancipation. Who were they? Why did they choose to dress as men? How were they represented? In what contexts?

Between reality and fiction, masculine women remained confined to various exceptional circumstances, but emerged from their marginality in the 1920s when fashion legitimated a certain degree of masculinisation through the androgynous model of the “garçonne” or the flapper.