The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime (Past and Present Publications)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: New Ed, 1/12/2008
EAN 9780521574549, ISBN10: 0521574544
Paperback, 564 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 3.6 cm
Language: English
Originally published in French
Newly avilable in paperback, this major contribution to cultural history is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Daniel Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent and the kind of clothes they wore. His essential argument is that there was a 'vestimentary revolution' in the later eighteenth century as all sections of the population became caught up in the world of fashion and fast-moving consumption.
List of plates
List of tables
Part I. History of Clothing
1. Clothing or costume? 2. The Quicherat effect and after
3. History, fashion and clothing systems from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries
Part II. The Economy of Wardrobes
4. Towards an understanding of the Parisian clothing system
5. The hierarchy of appearances in Paris from Louis XIV to Louis XVI
6. The contents of wardrobes from the classical age to the Revolution
7. The invention of linen
8. The triumph of appearances
nobilities and clothes
9. The discipline of appearances
the prestige of uniform
Part III. Producing, Selling and Stealing
the Distribution of Appearances
10. From crafts to customers
the Parisian clothing economy
11. From crafts to customers
tailors, dressmakers, linen-drapers and fashion merchants
12. From theft to resale
another aspect of the clothes trade
13. Caring for clothes
from propriety to cleanliness
Part IV. Truth and the Mask
14. Clothes in the novel
15. Rational and healthy clothes
16. Fashions in reason and reasons for fashion
the birth of the fashion press in France
Conclusion
The culture of appearances
consumption and morality
Index.
'At the outset Daniel Roche makes it known that he seeks to retrieve the history of clothes from the highly specialist world of folk museums and historians of costume. This stimulating work is the proof of his success.' Alan Forrest, The Times Literary Supplement