MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The French fashion design company, Sonia Rykiel, has designed a new purse, the Pavé Parisien, to commemorate the Paris Spring of May 1968. Vogue Magazine profiled the purse and interviewed Sonia Rykiel Artistic Director Julie de Libran who explained that the bag’s rectangular shape was intended to represent the paving stones French students pried out of the streets during the protests to hurl through shop windows and the like. Rykiel herself passed away in 2016, but de Libran characterized her as a kindred spirit to the students and their cause, using words like “radical” to describe her and “heady” to discuss May 1968.

The irony of this “satchel” as the company describes it and its evocation and memorialization of the popular protests of Paris 1968 however, is that the purse retails at high-end stores for $990 US. The popular protest movement led by students that culminated in the largest general strike in European history is represented by a purse far beyond the means of most Parisian students and factory workers then and now. The satchel comes in white, which de Libran suggests for “latter-day suffragettes” and red for “hard-line socialists.”

The Vogue article goes on to point out the utility of the satchel for the would-be activist because the inside pocket holds a cell phone so one can keep in touch with fellow activists and the sewn-in mirror allows one to look their best, even at a protest. It is this intersection of the 50th anniversary of the youth activism of 1968 with the unique climate of protest present currently that this paper will explore to reveal how the spirit of protest present in both eras has been/ is being commodified.