The Culture of Clothing
Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime

This book is easily the most thorough and wide-ranging study of clothing and its social meaning that has been written to date.

Daniel Roche (Author), Jean Birrell (Translated by)

9780521574549, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 October 1996

564 pages, 10 b/w illus. 42 tables
21.6 x 14 x 3.2 cm, 0.71 kg

'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

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.

Subject Areas: Fashion & society [JFCK]