Jones, Jennifer M.Unknown
Berg (Oxford, 2021) (eng) English9781847888860Unknown1st ed.SEX ROLE; UnknownThe 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 court-based fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationship between women and commercial culture, public and private spheres, and morality and taste. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those particularly critical of this ‘vulgar’ obsession with ‘tawdry finery’, declaring it to be ‘merely the external mark of a depravity shared with slaves’. The story of how la mode was ‘sexed’ as feminine offers a compelling insight into the political, economic and cultural tensions that marked the birth of modern commercial culture. Jones examines men’s and women’s relation to fashion at this time, looking at both consumption and production to argue how clothing was becoming increasingly conceptualized as feminine/effeminate. A concise history of French fashion culture suitable for anyone interested in eighteenth-century culture, women and gender studies or fashion history.
Physical dimension
1 online resource (xviii, 238 p.)Unknownill.
Summary / review / table of contents
Prologue: The Morning Toilette, circa 1785 --
Introduction --
pt. 1. La Cour : Absolutism and Appearance --
Courting La Mode and Costuming the French --
Objects of Desire, Subjects of the King --
pt. 2. La Ville : Clothing and Consumption in a Society of Taste --
A Natural Right to Dress Women --
The Problem of French Taste --
Coquettes and Grisettes --
Selling La Mode --
Epilogue: From Absolutist Gaze to Republican Look.