Nana, Emile Zola's 1880 novel about an actresscourtesan, describes the influence of the. demimondaine on the dress of middle- and upper-class women:

Her success, was sudden and decisive, a swift rise to fame in the garish light of lunatic extravagance and the wasteful follies of beauty. She at once became queen among the most expensive of her kind. . . .When she drove along the boulevards in her carriage, people would turn around and tell one another :who she was with all the emotion of a nation saluting its sovereign, while she lolled back in her flimsy dresses, smiling gaily under the rain of little golden curls which fell around the blue of her made-up eyes and the red of her painted lips. And the remarkable thing was that that buxom young woman, who was so awkward on the stage, so comical when she tried...