Fashion in History: A Global Look

Tutor: Giorgio Riello

Week 8

Tuesday 24 Novembre 2009

THE MAKING OF THE
FASHIONABLE CONSUMER IN
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
From previous lectures


Two points have to be underlined:

The city had been a place of fashion since the
middle ages but its role became more prominent

Court and city should not be seen necessarily as
opposites.
1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution

- Political Change: The French Revolution

- Economic Change: The Industrial Revolution

- Socio-cultural Change: The Consumer
Revolution


Consumption at all levels of society increased
substantially in west Europe in the eighteenth
century.

The favourite area of study has been England,
although other areas of Europe such as
France, Spain and the Netherlands,
experienced similar dynamics of change.


N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. Plumb, The birth of a consumer
society: the commercialisation of eighteenth century Britain
(London, 1982).


1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution





1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution
The pervasiveness of
consumption across the
social ladder: the majority
of people started
consuming not just
necessities but also
small luxuries, niceties,

J. Thirsk , Economic
Policy and Projects. The
Development of a
Consumer Society in
Early Modern
England(Oxford:
Clarendon 1978).
Fashion is central in McKendricks idea of a
consumer revolution.

According to McKendrick, fashion was generated
by the aesthetic choice and taste of the elite and

filtered down (trickle down) the social hierarchy

through a process of aping.
1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution
Fashionable Elite
Imitators
Thorstein Veblen,The Theory of the Leisured Class (1899).
The emergence of modern consumption
Emulation/social (McKendrick)

Desires/individual wants (Lorna Weatherill)
1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution
Beauty and Fashion.
Mezzotint. c. 1790.

The Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University,
797.1.24.1
2. The Consumer
Experience
- The Elite: aristocracy and beau monde


- Rising middle class (middling classes)


- The working class (plebeian classes) and the poor
2. The Consumer Experience

Following the Fashion: St. James's giving... By James Gillray
A Family of Three at Dinner, attr. Richard Collins. Oil on
canvas, c. 1727. 64.2 x 76.3 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
P.9&:1-1934
The role of Accessories

- Fine and Leopold



Concept of populuxe

- Cissie Fairchilds
Textile Samples and Fashion
Plates from album of
Barbara Johnson (1736-
1825). Victoria and Albert
Museum, Picture Library
EE015561-01.

Barbara Johnsons album
provides a unique testimony
of the dress taste of an
English women in the
eighteenth and early
nineteenth century.


The concept of Involuntary Consumers

John Styles, Custom or Consumption? Plebeian Fashion in
Eighteenth-Century England, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth
Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates,
Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003), pp.
103-18. HC 500.L8

John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London,
2007).


2. The Consumer Experience
William Beechey,
Portrait of Sir
Francis Fords
Children Giving a
Coin to a Begger
Boy, 1793. Tate
Gallery, London
3. The Culture of Fashion: Places and Media
of Consumption
William Hogarth, The Rake's Progress: 2. The Rake's Leve
1734. Oil on canvas. Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Late eighteenth-century French
fashion plate
the assistance of those
in the country who, as
they have not the
opportunities of seeing
the originals, may dress
by the figure

Habit of a Lady in The
Ladies Magazine, 1759
4. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century
An eighteenth-century
shop front
Apples shop in NY
Peddlers or Itinerant traders
L. Fontaine, History of peddlers in Europe (Cambridge, 1996).

Covent Garden was built in London in the 1640s as a market
with shops under the portico
Gersaints Shop Sign, by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Oil on Canvas
Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin-Brandenburg
Claire Walsh, Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-
Century London, Journal of Design History, 8/3 (1995), pp. 157-176.

the fine shops, which jut out at both sides of the front doors like
big, broad oriels, having fine large window-panes, behind which
wares are displayed, so that shops look far more elegant than
those in Paris

Sophie Von La Roche, Sophie in London (1789) (published 1933).
Messrs Harding Howell and Co (1810)
A shoemakers shop, c. 1808
Franois Boucher,
La Marchande de
modes, 1746
5. Shopping and Marketing
Going into at least twenty shops, having a thousand
things shown to us which we do not wish to buy, in
fact turning the whole shop upside down and, in the
end, perhaps leaving without purchasing anything. It
is impossible to admire sufficiently the patience of the
shopkeepers, who endure this nonsense without even
dreaming of showing annoyance.

J. Schopenhauer, A lady travels in England and
Scotland (English ed. 1988 [1803]), p. 151.
5. Shopping and Marketing
Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, Commerce and the
Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer
Goods in Eighteenth-Century England, in Michael North
and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400-
1800 (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 187-200. N 8600.A7
Trade Cards
John Johnson collection of trade cards online
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/johnson/johnson.htm
Conclusion

What do we mean by an 18
th
-century
consumer revolution?

- what people bought
- how (for instance shops)
- how fashion was represented (magazines, plates).