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Making An Impression Paris Fashion Exhibition Arrives in the U.S. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell I In his seminal pro-Impressionist essay "Le Peintre de La Vie Modern" ("The Painter of Modern Life"), published in 1863, Baudelaire defined modernity as "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the 32 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 eternal and the immutable." n 1896, the magazine L'Artiste noted that there were only two ways a woman could become a Parisienne: by birth or by dress. Now there is a third: by visiting the blockbuster exhibition "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 26–May 27) or the Art Institute of Chicago (June 26–September 22). In addition to an array of approximately ninety paintings by the Impressionists and their contemporaries—many of them iconic—the exhibition includes photographs, fashion plates, advertisements, cartes de visite, and exquisite surviving garments and accessories, primarily from the 1860s to the 1880s. It is enough to make anyone declare: "Vive la France!" Though we may think of the Impressionists as being hazy on details, they captured the details of dress with remarkable precision, if not the photographic verisimilitude of so-called peintres-couturiers (fashion portraitists) like Alfred Stevens or James Tissot. Fashion was not a frivolous distraction, but central to literary and artistic investigations of modernity. "The latest fashion, you see, is absolutely necessary for a painter," Édouard Manet asserted. "It's what matters most." While visitors to the exhibition may struggle at first to see what is so "modern" about corsets, crinolines and top hats, they will quickly become immersed in its lavish reconstruction of the volatile social and artistic milieu of nineteenth-century