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"Behind the Seams" considers aspects of fashion, visual, and cultural studies that have received little critical attention. An NEH Fellowship would allow me to complete a full draft of this book by September 2015. Part One deals with women fashion workers and their conflation with prostitutes through visual representation and other popular media, notably vaudeville. Part Two focuses on female fashion writers of leading nineteenth-century fashion publications. Included here are female illustrators of fashion plates from the nineteenth-century women's press and a critical analysis of the visual rhetoric of the fashion plate. My epilogue explores the folkloric figure of the "catherinette," who encapsulates evolving roles of female fashion workers at the turn of the twentieth century. The book offers a important contribution to fashion, visual culture, and French cultural studies and will help to build intersections among costume history, object analysis, and cultural studies.