HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London's fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society - the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and country seats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan 'fashion'.

Crowston explores the role of fashionable appearances and sexual desire in leveraging credit and reconstructs women's vigorous participation in its gray markets. The scandalous relationship between Queen Marie Antoinette and fashion merchant Rose Bertin epitomizes the vertical loyalties and deep social divides of the credit regime and its increasingly urgent political stakes.

This book is a study of dress in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. Roche uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between social classes. This was an age of sumptuous fashion gravures and of a new press for ladies of leisure which provided their readers with a stimulating mixture of fashion and public affairs. There was a new concern for respectability as well as a desire to impress.

During the reigns of Louis XV (1723-74) and Louis XVI (1774-92), fashion and furniture were not simply meant to be beautiful but were also intended to arouse, attract, and seduce.  Published in response to the critically acclaimed and hugely popular exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum in the fall of 2004, Dangerous Liaisons focuses on fashion and its interplay with the paintings, furniture, and decorative arts of eighteenth-century France. Featuring beautiful color photographs of the exhibition’s installation, details of the garments, and supplementary historical material, the book demonstrates how the extravagant clothing of the period reiterated the splendor of Rococo and Neoclassical interiors.

The clothing trades examined in this volume covered the backs of sailors and soldiers, provided shirts for labouring men and skirts for working women, employed legions of needlewomen and supplied retailers with new consumer wares. Garments, once bought, returned again to the marketplace, circulating like currency and bolstering demand. Demand for new-styled 'luxuries' and necessities fueled the clothing market.

Ribeiro surveys the clothing worn by the middle and upper classes throughout Europe in the 18th century, and discusses what this meant in terms of social definition and identity. This edition includes many new illustrations.

This book examines European dress as it evolved in eighteenth-century France. The author looks at French dress first from an aesthetic point of view. Then she examines the social and economic factors affecting fashion.

The material lives of ordinary English men and women were transformed in the years following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Tea and sugar, the fruits of British mercantile and colonial expansion, altered their diets. Pendulum clocks enriched their homes. But it was in their clothing that ordinary people enjoyed the greatest change in their material lives.

Fabricating Womenexamines the social institution of the seamstresses' guild in France from the time of Louis XIV to the Revolution. In contrast with previous scholarship on women and gender in the early modern period, Clare Haru Crowston asserts that the rise of the absolute state, with its centralizing and unifying tendencies, could actually increase women's economic, social, and legal opportunities and allow them to thrive in corporate organizations such as the guild.

Volume 1 documents the Kyoto Costume Institute's extensive collection of 18th and 19th century European clothing with an emphasis on women's fashions.

Historical Style connects the birth of 18th-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. If you prefer a print copy, check Tripod.

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

The term "macaroni" was once as familiar a label as "punk" or "hipster" is today. In this handsomely illustrated book devoted to notable 18th-century British male fashion, the author brings together dress, biography, and historical events with the broader visual and material culture of the late 18th century. For thirty years, macaroni was a highly topical word, yielding a complex set of social, sexual, and cultural associations.

The connection between fashion, femininity, frivolity and Frenchness has become a cliché. Yet, relegating fashion to the realm of frivolity and femininity is a distinctly modern belief that developed along with the urban culture of the Enlightenment. In eighteenth-century France, a commercial culture filled with shop girls, fashion magazines and window displays began to supplant a courtly fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationshipsbetween women and commercial culture and between morality and taste. The story of how "la mode" was "sexed" as feminine offers compelling insights into the political, economic and cultural tensions that marked the birth of modern commercial culture.